Kids these days: On generation and crisis

Abstract

Generation and crisis have both proven to be analytically slippery concepts in the social sciences, and yet have a vivid social life in popular discourse and thinking. In this introduction, we make a case for refining both concepts by thinking them together. We argue that, as ideas and in lived experience, generation and crisis turn on a shared paradox: both simultaneously index rupture and continuity, in social life, relations, and time. We suggest that attributions of crisis mark breaks in or suspensions of history around which generations are imagined; and that, in turn, generational thinking and the relations it describes (personal and political) provide key means of critiquing and reshaping pasts and futures in times of crisis. The formation of generations in times of crisis – whether genealogically, in terms of the life course, or as historical cohorts – and the multiplicity of intergenerational relations that emerge as a result, open opportunities for critically recalibrating history, as well as effecting social transformation.

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