Disjuncture by default: Arrhythmic life-worlds and intergenerational injustice
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper presents a novel interrogation of the how the temporalities of young and older adulthood intersect in the context of enabling/disabling everyday political action. The rigid time-space structures that typically characterise young adulthood (such as formal education systems) often determine the contexts of and opportunities for young people’s activism, whether situated inside or outside of those structures. Yet the key enabling mechanisms of that activism – from access to physical spaces and resources such as funding, to validation in older adult-led fora – rarely map neatly onto younger adult time-space. I argue that this is doubly limiting: young people’s opportunities to participate in meaningful, sustained and impactful action are hampered by lack of timely support, and institutions’ ability to capitalise on young people’s expertise, creativity and commitment is constrained by lack of timely engagement. I consider the extent to which this constitutes ‘disjuncture by default’ – a politically-inflected and (un)intentionally limiting of young people’s agency on the part of the older adult producers of enabling (or disabling) systems. Drawing on recent experiences of attempting to sustain a youth-led climate action project in the UK, I employ notions of arrhythmia, timeliness and ‘temporal opportunity structures’ (Nilsen, 2023) to examine the implications of this disjuncture. I suggest that contemporary discourses of youth empowerment are undermined by institutional rhythms too readily viewed as monolithic and immutable, rather than changeable and responsive, and that this risks inhibiting young adults’ political agency, exacerbating existing intergenerational injustices. I conclude with some reflections on what this might mean for researcher praxis.
Source: Political Geography
Author: Rebecca Collins
Language: English
Topic: Youth, Politics, and Society
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,540
OpenAlex ID: W7212449924