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 sustain- able 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 sys- temic 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 innova- tive forms of cooperation in different fields, from worker rights to environ- ment protection. 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.