Living well today and tomorrow: young people, good life narratives, and sustainability | Working Paper

Summary

In this working paper, we explore young people’s use of shared social understandings to describe what is important in their present lives, to envision their futures, and to respond to the challenges they identify to the realisation of their good lives. Understanding ‘good lives’ as a socially constructed concept, we focus on young people’s discourses given the role of discourse in bringing realities about and shape what is thought about and how. We use data generated from focus groups carried out in the context of a filmmaking project that took place in 2018-2019 with young people aged 10-14 living in Surrey (South-East England). In this project, four groups of 4-8 young people (n = 22 total) from diverse socio-economic backgrounds shared their views on what living well meant to them. We focus on the different good life narratives that young people used to describe what living well means in their present and future lives, as well as how they talked about navigating the future. We show that young people both used narratives which contested the consumerist understanding of living well and used narratives which reproduced the status quo. Highlighting the relationship between sustainability and deliberative democracy, we conclude by emphasising the necessity to listen to young people even when their understandings contradict scholarly definitions of wellbeing and sustainability.