Updating a Generational Lens for Understanding Contemporary Mobility: Global lessons for thinking about intergenerational change and intergenerational justice


Dan Woodman, University of Melbourne

Political, economic, and social changes and crises around the world are often interpreted through the lens of generational shifts, even intergenerational conflict. Others counter that a focus on generations obscures continuing differences and inequalities, particularly related to class and geography as it deemphasises important differences within age cohorts and contexts. Grounded in an overview of the sociology of generations and what it has to say about change and mobility, this presentation will look at the way the notion of generations is used in different parts of the world, with a focus on the Asia Pacific. This presentation interrogates and develops one of the major conceptual traditions for thinking about social change as it intersects with youth, education and the life course: the sociology of generations. Political, economic, and social changes and crises around the world are often interpreted through the lens of generational shifts, even intergenerational conflict. Other Influential voices counter that a focus on generations obscures continuing differences and inequalities, particularly related to class, geography, and mobility, within cohorts. In other words, generational framing is positioned as deemphasising important differences within age cohorts, within and between nations, and differing access to mobility (economic and geographic). Grounded in an overview of the sociology of generations and what it has to say about change and mobility, this presentation will look at the way the notion of generations is used in different parts of the world, with a focus on the Asia Pacific. I use these insights from multiple contexts to develop a generational approach to education and youth that I propose can be a useful addition to the theoretical approaches used to study young people’s geographical and social mobility. My approach both builds on and departing from the foundational sociology of generations developed by Karl Mannheim (1952), the renowned sociologist of knowledge and of education, proposing a way to think about social change and mobility that is better attuned to intergenerational dynamics within families (Woodman 2022). I develop Mannheim’s early insights on the role of intergenerational dynamics between students and teachers within the context of rapid social change, extending these ideas to intergenerational relationship within the family, particularly between parents and their young adult children when separated by social change and mobility. I propose that drawing on diverse understandings of generations from different parts of the world can help improve theorising within the Mannheimian tradition, orienting youth studies and education researchers to the effects of social change on the nature of intergenerational relationships, including new connections as well as intergenerational tensions. I illustrate this contemporary approach to the sociology of generations as it applies to mobility using two examples from my collaborative work. The first is a qualitative study of young creative workers, primarily musicians, in Indonesia who have relocated to Bali for their careers. The second is a mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) longitudinal study of young people in Australia who are being financially supported by their parents well into their young adulthood. Discussing these examples, I conclude that an orientation to generations is limited if it is only used to illustrate change across groups within countries, but not new connections and movements across borders. However, the opposite is also a limitation, too easily slipping into claims of a global generation that homogenise important differences between young people. A sociology of generations lens can be a usual additional to approaches to research on youth, education, and mobility, and for asking questions about social justice in the context of this research, but such a lens needs simultaneously to be aware of these differences and similarities across context and how they are being refigured in the contemporary.

This paper will be presented at the following session: