Cross-National Projected Futures in Contexts of Insecurity

• In Event: Identities, Repertoires, and Interpretive Resources

Abstract

Projected futures have increasingly been foregrounded in sociological research, particularly because of their role in shaping behaviors and outcomes. Research has shown that future projections can vary, and can be influenced by factors like social class resources and cultural beliefs. Recently, scholars have called for comparative research that investigates how projected futures may vary cross-nationally. This paper responds to this call, while also drawing on previous theorization about the dimensions of projectivity. I ask: how do people’s projected futures vary cross-nationally? How do structural features and cultural narratives, which can be shared or vary across national contexts, influence the dimensions of the futures that people imagine? And how do these projected futures align with people’s outcomes years later? Drawing on 127 interviews with young college graduates facing insecurity—that is, employment precarity and/or economic instability—in the U.S. and Spain, as well as ongoing follow-up interviews five years later, I find that respondents in each country display distinct orientations toward the future, as seen along three dimensions of projected futures: in their variety (the range of different futures), clarity (the specificity and certainty of futures), and reach (how far into the future they imagine). American respondents typically describe more varied, vaguer, and longer-term futures than Spanish respondents. I also find that social class background influence respondents’ projected futures, but in cross-nationally varying ways. American graduates from middle-class backgrounds typically imagine vaguer and shorter-term futures than their counterparts from working-class families; the reverse is true in Spain. I show how different structural and cultural factors in each national context influence the ways respondents facing insecurity imagine their futures. This paper contributes to the cultural research on projected futures, as well as to the research on insecurity, revealing a way in which different conditions of insecurity shape the ways people move through the world.

Author

• Elena Ayala-Hurtado, Princeton University