Haunted Aspirations and Youth Transitions in the Contemporary Context

Contemporary generations of youth are undertaking their "transitions" to adulthood in a period marked by considerable temporal precarity and anxiety. A range of intersecting socio-structural changes and crises have not only made it more difficult for contemporary young people to achieve historically conventional markers of adulthood but have also undermined the previously taken-for-granted sense of continuity between the present and future. Youth studies have been alert to how these shifts have reshaped young people's lives in the present and their dispositions towards uncertain futures. Significantly less attention has been paid to how this temporal uncertainty evokes the past, present and future in young people's own perceptions and navigations of the contemporary context. Using the concept of hauntology and drawing on the narratives of 11 working-class young people as they reflect on their transitions to adulthood, this paper provides insights into how young people's experiences and dispositions in the present are powerfully haunted by losses from both the past and the future.