Conference Agenda

Existential threats posed by the ongoing war in Ukraine, climate change and its impact on habitable and livable places, the endangerment of democracies by “alternative facts”, and AI that has made learning and working conditions precarious and contribute to unemployment among young people: these developments document that the promise of progress in modernity no longer applies in Western industrialized countries. Especially with regards to the current crisis, late modernity seems to be characterized above all by the experience of losing what seemed to be guaranteed for the longest time: loss of optimism about the future, material stability, trust in institutions (Reckwitz 2024). For children and young people, this new status quo is accompanied by restrictions on their individual and social expectations for the future (TUI Foundation 2025, p. 79), fears (e.g., of climate change, cf. Kühner et al. 2025; of war, cf. Lasten ja nuorten säätiö/Tietoevry 2022, p. 14) and increasing mental health problems (Tarasenko et al. 2025).

At the same time, there is criticism that children and young people are growing up in a state of permanent crisis, overlooked by politicians and outsourced to institutions such as daycare centers and schools that are inadequately equipped to deal with these stresses (El-Mafaalani et al. 2025).

This diagnosis raises various questions on three levels for educational research on children and young people.

On a theoretical level the validity of classical youth theories is questionable. Many rely on a logic of modernity: Havighurst (1948), for example, assumes that there are developmental tasks to be accomplished during adolescence. But if typical adult goals—steady job, family, home—are no longer achievable or desirable, how relevant is the theory? These theories assume linear learning and educational processes with identifiable goals. This narrative is eroding in late modernity. How could youth be theoretically rethought?

At the institutional level, it is important to consider how politicians and educational institutions view childhood and youth as a resource, what expectations they have of them, and how they create the conditions in which they can shape their everyday lives in a practical way.

Global social developments have an impact on how and where young people live, what educational paths they take, what they do with their peers in their free time, and what relationships they have with their significant others. On an empirical level, this raises the question of how children and young people deal with the challenges of late modernity, what practices they learn, and how they shape their own and society's future in various institutions.

The symposium consists of three presentations that collectively explore how the experiences of young people are shaped within different pedagogical organisations and under conditions of societal crisis, highlighting the interplay of social structures, biographical meaning, and future orientations. This allows to identify a range of strategies that young people deploy within varying institutional settings.

The first paper examines how pupils in Czech schools navigate institutionally mediated uncertainty and how social inequality, support, and future orientations shape their responses. The second paper analyses how intersecting inequalities shape the post-16 trajectories of young people in England who leave school early, revealing an invisible class ceiling in access to vocational training and employment. The third paper examines how young men in Germany and Finland experience military service under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty, focusing on how differing regimes of obligation shape biographical meaning, future orientations, and pedagogical experiences. With school students (paper 1), Early education leavers (2) and conscripts (3), the symposium focuses on specific challenges each of these groups face with regards to how social inequality and current crises play out in distinct national contexts.

This paper contributes to the joint symposium by offering an empirically grounded social-pedagogical perspective on how experiences of uncertainty and open futures are articulated within everyday school contexts. It focuses on how such conditions are mediated through educational practices, relationships, and expectations in Czech primary schools, and on the role of schools as institutions that translate broader societal uncertainties into everyday educational realities. The central aim is to examine pupils’ ways of navigating uncertainty within institutional environments that continue to rely on implicit assumptions of linear development, future planning, and performance-oriented progression. From a social-pedagogical standpoint, the paper explores how schools function as spaces where societal uncertainties are embedded in daily routines, interactions, and evaluative frameworks, and how pupils respond to these conditions through their coping strategies, perceptions of social support, and future orientations. The analysis draws on data collected from a cohort study of pupils in grades 4, 5, 8 and 9 attending primary schools in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. Quantitative data were collected using standardised instruments measuring resilience and coping strategies, perceived social support from parents, teachers and peers, school-related self-concept, performance motivation, socio-economic background, and educational aspirations. Using an exploratory analytical approach, the paper focuses on age-related differences and internal tensions in pupils’ responses, rather than assuming linear developmental trajectories. The findings indicate that pupils’ approaches to uncertainty are characterised by heterogeneity and ambivalence. Coping strategies frequently combine problem-solving, avoidant and emotion-regulation elements, suggesting situationally adaptive but fragmented patterns of response. Perceived social support plays an important role, yet its availability is uneven. While some pupils experience school as a relationally supportive environment, others primarily perceive it as a pressurised space of evaluation. Among older pupils, future-related orientations are more often marked by hesitation and conditionality than by clearly articulated plans. By situating these findings within a social-pedagogical framework, the paper may contribute to debates on the limits of educational models grounded in assumptions of predictability and linear progression. It highlights the need for pedagogical approaches that recognise uncertainty as a normal condition of contemporary childhood and adolescence, emphasising relational support, reflexive institutional practices within schools, and spaces where pupils can articulate insecurity, ambiguity and open futures without being framed as deficits or risks.

Biesta, G. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm Publishers. Bryan, T. K., Lea, M., & Hyánek, V. (2023). Resilience, Ambiguous Governance, and the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis: Perspectives from NGO Leaders in the Czech Republic. Central European Economic Journal, 10(57), 35-49. https://doi.org/10.2478/ceej-2023-0003 Jones, T. M. and Fleming, C. B. (2021). A multilevel model of the association between school climate and racial differences in academic outcomes. Psychology in the Schools, 58(5), 893-912. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22477 Ungar M. (2011). The social ecology of resilience: addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct. The American journal of orthopsychiatry, 81(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2010.01067.x Urbanová, E. (2021). Leader and innovator in the context of educational reforms. International Journal of Social Sciences, 10(2), 69-79. https://doi.org/10.52950/ss.2021.10.2.005

Since 2015 young people in England have been officially required to stay in full-time education or participate in work-based learning until they are 18. However, the policy is not enforced. Currently around 28% of 16–18-year-olds are not in full-time education and the majority of these (16.3% of all 16-18-year-olds) are either in employment without training (8.3%) or not in any kind of employment, education or training (NEET) (8%). Only a small minority of 16-18-year-olds are in apprenticeships or employment with training (4.6% and 3.7% respectively) (DfE, 2024). The ongoing cost of living crisis and rising youth unemployment and precarity have had a profound impact on young people who leave school early with negative effects on their wellbeing (Russell and Thompson, 2025). The challenges many young people face when they leave school at 16 are compounded by multiple inequalities stemming from their time in school (Russell and Thompson, 2025). This paper focuses on the experiences of young people in England who leave school at 16 and look for paid employment or apprenticeships instead of staying in full-time education. It examines the factors informing their decisions and inequalities in their access to vocational education and training, employment and the formal and informal resources that can help them make and exercise career and employment choices that are meaningful to them. In doing so, the paper illuminates how intersecting inequalities interact to produce very different post-16 trajectories for differently positioned early education leavers. The core argument of the presentation is that, just as there is an invisible ‘class ceiling’ limiting entry to ‘elite’ careers by people from working-class backgrounds (Friedman and Laurison, 2019), so an equivalent ceiling operates at the ‘lower’ to ‘middle’ end of the labour market. This restricts opportunities for those from the least socio-economically advantaged working-class backgrounds - especially for those whose socio-economic disadvantage intersects with having unmet special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) and/or with living in areas characterised by high deprivation and depressed labour markets. The analysis draws on qualitative interviews with 22 early education leavers who we have been following from the age of 16, when they were in their last year of lower secondary education, to the age of 20. The analysis is also informed by findings from the first two waves of a nationally representative longitudinal survey of young people’s post-16 transitions being conducted as part of the Young Lives Young Futures study[1].

[1] The Youg Lives Young Futures study is a five-year longitudinal study of the education-to-work transitions of young people in England who do not go to university. References: DfE (Department for Education) (2024) Participation in education, training and employment age 16 to 18, Available from: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/participation-in-education-and-training-and-employment#releaseHeadlines-tables Friedman, S. and Laurison, D. (2019) The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged, Bristol: Policy Press. Russell, L., and Thompson, R. (2025) ‘Predicting educational exclusion: A literature review of risk factors associated with early leaving from education’, European Educational Research Journal, Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041251378585.

A stable, secure, and peaceful future no longer appears self-evident under late-modern conditions; instead, it seems increasingly precarious and endangered (Rakowski et al., 2025; Reckwitz, 2024). Russia’s war against Ukraine, as well as political ambitions of the U.S. administration regarding Greenland, challenge established international legal orders and security assumptions. European states are therefore confronted with the question of how to respond to aggression. One instrument discussed in this context is military service, within which adolescents and young adults are trained to become soldiers. While Germany is moving toward reintroducing a compulsory service, in Finland it is a fixed component of the youth phase. Young people are addressed as bearers of hope and agents of change (Spyrou et al., 2011). Yet it remains underexplored how adolescents experience military service and how they position themselves toward this obligatory task under conditions of insecurity. An ongoing exploratory research project addresses this desideratum using biographical and problem-centered interviews (Schütze, 2016; Witzel & Reiter, 2012) with former Finnish and German conscripts (aged 18-25). The material is analysed using sociolinguistic process analysis (Schütze, 2008a, 2008b) and the documentary method (Przyborski, 2024). The presentation highlights two dimensions. First, the biographical dimension: different degrees of obligation (Finland: conscription, Germany: not compulsory) shape the biographical meaning of service and how young men deal with temporality and the future in light of (in)secure futures, the threat of war, and the (un)predictability of their life course. The interviewees work through the tension between emotions such as hope (Cook et al., 2019) and “futurelessness” (Tutton, 2023). In addition, some conscripts frame military service as a familial, transgenerational project. Second, the pedagogical dimension: in both countries, interviewees report forms of leadership based on obedience and fear, which can be interpreted as education (in the sense of Erziehung, Biesta 2022). These experiences with authoritarian instructors trigger (painful) learning processes for conscripts. The presentation critically discusses to what extent such a pedagogy in the armed forces is contemporary and appropriate. Overall, the presentation contributes to educational youth research and provides answers to the question of what military service, as a biographical status passage, signifies for the learning and socialisation processes of young people. Furthermore, it discusses the extent to which military service can be interpreted as an imposition on youth by older generations and whether it is just to (pedagogically) address young people in such a manner during times of crisis.

Biesta, G. (2022). World-Centred Education. New York: Routledge. Cook, J., & Cuervo, H. (2019). Agency, futurity and representation: Conceptualising hope in recent sociological work. The Sociological Review, 67(5), 1102-1117. Przyborski, A. (2024): Documentary Method. In: Wolfradt, U., et al. (Eds.), Cultural Psychology. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 183–196. Rakowski, J. J. et al. (2025). Characterizing the Global Polycrisis: A Systematic Review of Recent Literature. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 50, pp. 159-183. Reckwitz, A. (2024). Verlust. Ein Grundproblem der Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Schütze, F. (2008). Biography Analysis on the Empirical Base of Autobiographical Interviews: Part one. European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion, 1-2, 153-242. Schütze, F. (2008b). Biography Analysis on the Empirical Base of Autobiographical Interviews: Part two. European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion, 3-4, 5-77. Schütze, F. (2016). Sozialwissenschaftliche Prozessanalyse. Grundlagen der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Opladen, Berlin & Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich. Spyrou, S., Theodorou, E., & Christou, G. (2021). Crafting futures with hope: Young climate activists’ imaginaries in an age of crisis and uncertainty. Children & Society, 36, 731–746. Tutton, R. (2023). The Sociology of Futurelessness. Sociology, 57(2): pp. 438–453. Witzel, A./Reiter, H. (2012): The Problem-centred Interview. Principles and Practice. SAGE Publications.