Temporality and Identity in Youth Research

Abstract

Reflecting on youth research in education, this response to McKenzie’s chapter supports a more explicit and sustained engagement with issues of temporality in both research methodology and conceptual approaches to interpreting youth identity. The value of looking more historically at youth identity formation and identity practices is juxtaposed with the predominant focus on identifying and representing youth voice. It considers examples drawn from a qualitative longitudinal study of young people from the ages of 12–18 years, to suggest some of the inherent temporality of youth becomings and to briefly explore different metaphors for imagining youth identity formation. In particular the significance of the dynamic relationship between past and present, and between memory and narrative is discussed. This matter is explored further in reference to the experience of conducting oral history interviews for a history of adolescence – such interviews vividly expose the collision of temporalities in self making, and the powerful ways remembering and forgetting both make and undo narratives about the self, and about one’s own personal and collective history.