Reconceptualising ‘generations’ in education and youth research: intergenerational dynamics, multiple temporalities and affective practices

The concept of generations holds a contested place in sociological scholarship concerned with education and youth. Advocates of generational analysis highlight the significance of structural shifts in shaping young people’s futures, including dramatic growth in university enrolments and diminishing employment outcomes. However, such approaches risk overstating and homogenising the impacts of these social changes, obscuring the messy interplay of past and present in how futures are imagined and navigated. This paper critically considers the concept of generations, its mobilisation in educational and youth studies over the last decade, and how it might be reframed through a more robust engagement with questions of temporality and place. Working with intergenerational narratives of students and their parents from one Australian school and informed by historical and psychosocial theorising, the paper shows how young people’s aspirations and futures thinking are mediated by intergenerational dynamics and embedded within distinct, historically situated places and communities.