Imaginaries of the ‘non-future’ of the youth: Mapping undesired futures

Abstract

This article is a result of a wider research about the “Imaginaries of Future of the Youth.” It focuses on the futures that the young hope to avoid. The objective of this article is the analysis of undesired/unwanted futures. In order to carry out this research and elaborate a relational map of the undesired futures of teenagers between 15 and 18 years, we have worked in collaboration with 3 secondary state schools (secondary education and A-levels) in the province of Barcelona (one of them in Barcelona city, and two in towns nearby of between 6000 to 10000 inhabitants). The results presented in this article are based on the answers students provided to the question of what they would not want to happen to them in the future. The answers have been collected anonymously and codified with Atlas.ti, following the three coding phases suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1997). As a result, we have created a relational map of imaginaries of undesired futures, which then allowed us to trace individual imaginaries of failure, and collective imaginaries of loss.