In the 2020s, the transition to adulthood has become fundamentally disrupted by a succession of ‘unsettling events’ and an accumulation of macro-crises.
Navigating a landscape shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recessions, climate anxiety, and the acute geopolitical instability of the war in Ukraine, young people in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region find their biographical paths increasingly fragmented.
This paper explores how this compounding polycrisis reshapes young people's temporal horizons, capacity to aspire, and practical orientations toward planning and imagined futures.
Drawing on qualitative longitudinal data from the ULTRAGEN (swps.pl) project - specifically examining in-depth and asynchronous interviews with young adults in Poland collected across multiple waves (2021–2023) during critical crisis flashpoints. In this talk Pustulka will investigate the structural and biographical resources that dictate young women and men's transitions in relation to imagined futures and plans.
Conceptually, she will highlight a growing disjointment between broad, imagined and imaginative futures and structured, goal-oriented short-term plans.
Specifically, the analysis addresses the shift from neoliberal frameworks demanding linear, long-term lifecourse planning, to ‘constrained futurity’ driven by structural constraints of polycrisis. Emphasis is placed on the concepts of adaptability, presentism and transformations of classic developmental moratoriums into precarious states of passive ‘permawaithood’ as features of uncertain futures.
Bio
Paula Pustułka (swps.pl), PhD, sociologist, Associate Professor at SWPS University in Warsaw. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of young people and generations, particularly regarding three key areas - gender, family, and migration trajectories - as contexts that shape transitions in individual life paths and generational experiences
She conducts research using qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, specializing in qualitative multiperspective, longitudinal, and multisited studies, as well as ethics and data analysis. She is a recipient and Principal Investigator for National Science Centre (NCN) grants: GEMTRA: Transition to Motherhood Across Three Generations of Polish Women (2018–2022), ULTRAGEN: Becoming an Adult in Times of Ultra-Uncertainty: An Intergenerational Theory of ‘Shaky’ Transitions (2021–2026), and IRIMTA: Intergenerational Relations In Migrants’ Transitions-to-Adulthood. Polish families with young adult children in Germany and Norway (2023–2027).
At SWPS University, Paula Pustułka serves as the head of the Youth Research Center (Młodzi w Centrum Lab). She is a member of the Executive Board of RN13 “Sociology of Families & Intimate Lives” of the European Sociological Association, as well as the Board of the Section for Sociology of Family Life and Intimacy of the Polish Sociological Association (PTS).
She published in Journal of Youth Studies, Field Methods, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Emerging Adulthood, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Housing Studies and Social Identities. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Polish Sociological Review (PSR).
