Over the past year, we’ve been preoccupied by the generational categories and consciousnesses that seem to cohere around social-political movements and identities, and in-between-across geographies. We are left wondering, how do our understandings of generation — the behaviors, dispositions, and trends we feel aligned with — diverge from, reformulate, or reclaim artifacts of previous ones? What temporalities bind us together, and how do they help us bridge individual experiences to imagine collective ones? How does age shape our experience of these shifts—what do we gain, lose, or reinterpret with time? And, as time seems to be folding in on itself, how might we re-conceptualize generations as in flux, in transition, and in relation?
Experiencing Generation
As “new” forms of popular culture continue to emerge, quality pieces of the past are brought back into the present by those who did not directly experience their era, re-appropriated and re-articulated. As expressions of sexuality, gender, and subcultural belonging seem to be more and more accepted, we also see their co-opting by and absorption into mass consumer culture. With time, personal and collective identities also morph—not just in reaction to external forces, but through the process of aging itself. How do our bodies, desires, and politics evolve as we move through different life stages? As we try to develop our own identities, unique from our parents and predecessors, how do we also reckon with our inheritance of knowledge, intimacy, trauma, and material realities that continue to echo in our present?
Movement, Space, and Technology
As the realities of our global political-economic forces lay bare, how do we look back to radical pasts and social movements and find the need, at times, to forge new paths? What does it mean to hold onto radical politics, queerness, or rebellion across decades? As borders are asserted and transgressed by state forces, and as (the lack of) physical space of gathering structure our everyday interaction, how do we find ways to connect?
And, as technology continues to advance at a frightening rate, how do we manage the promise and dystopic realities it makes materialize? And as our relationship to technology shifts with age—how do generational gaps widen through digital fluency, and what might nostalgia for past tools and platforms cause to resurface?
In this issue
Articles, e-exhibitions, and stories inside the issue meditate on generational inheritance (descending from exiled parents, perspectives on love, relating to queer genealogies and histories in the Arabic-speaking region); issues of technology and medicine (technological promises turned upside-down; engaging in politics via social media; reclaiming folk practices that complement modern medicine); and movements, mobilities, and flows (conceptualisations of political correctness, the role of youth in political activism, the threat of third spaces for political binary regimes). We also reflect on time as a force—how age shapes activism, how queer elders and youth relate across generations, and what it means to carry a sense of belonging through changing bodies, minds, and worlds.
