Now what? How time perspective and university context shape final-year students' life projects

Michalis Christodoulou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

The completion of university studies is considered a critical event for young people. In this article I investigate how final-year university students experience temporality by researching their cognitive and relational frameworks. By "cognitive" frameworks I mean how students frame their temporal orientations and by relational frameworks I mean their social involvement with their object of study and their employment status. My research provides a sociological understanding on the explanatory value of these two frameworks as to how agentic the students' life plans are. Data are theorised through a sociological perspective according to which youth temporalities regarding agency can be approached as a sign of a standoff temporality. I argue that standoff temporality is a viable framework for making sense of cases of youth transitions for which the decision-making process and future thinking are fuelled by the temporality of the "present future" and of staying in place.
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Author: Dr Michalis Christodoulou is an assistant professor in the Department of Primary Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He attained a PhD in sociology (Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Patras, Greece), and BSc in philosophy (Department of Philosophy, University of Patras). He completed a postdoctoral appointment in social theory (Department of Sociology, University of Crete). Michalis co-edited Emotions, temporalities and working-class identities in the 21st century (Nova, 2019; https://novapublishers.com/shop/emotions-temporalities-and-working-class-identities-in-the-21st-century/) and co-authored Social causation and biographical research: Philosophical, theoretical and methodological arguments (Routledge, 2020; https://www.routledge.com/Social-Causation-and-Biographical-Research-Philosophical-Theoretical-and/Tsiolis-Christodoulou/p/book/9780367620394). His research is focused on qualitative data analysis, epistemology of educational research and educational research designs. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4420-7914 Email: mchristodoulou@eled.auth.gr Please cite as: Christodoulou, M. (2024). Now what? How time perspective and university context shape final-year students' life projects. Issues in Educational Research, 34(2), 436-458. http://www.iier.org.au/iier34christodoulou.pdf