Critical Agency and Creative Imagination: Snapshots of the Future Among Youth Networks of Activism in Italy

Kairos is the fragile catching-up with the right moment; today when it happens in the high complexity in which we are living, it lets us glimpse what a sustainable future could be. This effort is crucial for contemporary youth movements that – especially with the economic “great recession,” the pandemic, and the emergency of climate change – tackled with uncertainty, individualization and crisis of representative politics. The aim of this chapter is to analyze this systemic issue with the help of a research fieldwork in Italy, based on the analysis of a network of experiences of youth mobilizations as reinvention of politics, characterized by the encounter of personal meaningful activities and innovative forms of cooperation in different fields, from worker rights to environment protection. These creative experimentations of emancipative activism, rooted in everyday troubles, in the local dimension, in horizontal relations, ina strategy characteristic of a time where the future can be glimpsed mainly from local and concrete experiences, rather than based on abstract long-term visions. the mutual recognition of fragility, represent a form of critical agency, but also These creative experimentations of emancipative activism, rooted in everyday troubles, in the local dimension, in horizontal relations, in the mutual recognition of fragility, represent a form of critical agency, but also a strategy characteristic of a time where the future can be glimpsed mainly from local and concrete experiences, rather than based on abstract long-term visions.