Self-made futures: young people’s capitalist and anti-capitalist strategies in a retrenching welfare state” (DIYFuture)

The project examines young people’s strategies for responding to the uncertainty in the intersection of welfare state retrenchment and asset economy and young people’s changing interpretations of individual and collective responsibility. Young people’s experiences of uncertainty have been studied extensively, but its connection to the capitalist system and to the transformation of the welfare state’s collective safety nets has received less attention. The project addresses this gap by focusing on two distinct groups: young investors and young anticapitalists.

The project’s premise is that young people’s investing and anticapitalism are signals of their new strategies for managing risk and uncertainty that are detached from state-linked collective safety nets. Examining these opposing empirical cases together offers a novel perspective on young people’s trust in the welfare state, the cultural meaning of wage labor, and the relationship between individual and collective responsibility.

This multidisciplinary project brings together theories and perspectives from youth studies, utopian studies, and political economy, and develops theorization of individualized responsibility by integrating these approaches. The ethnographic research material consists of observations in the communities and networks of young investors and anti-capitalist actors, interviews with young people, and social media content.

The project asks how young people understand their futures, risks and risk management, how responsibility is conceptualized, and what kinds of meanings work and wealth acquire. The project’s empirical results will benefit actors working with young people and anyone seeking to understand changes in the welfare state emerging at the micro level. The theoretical development provides tools particularly for youth studies and for research fields that examine the relationships between individuality, collectivity, and structures.

Start year:

2026

End year:

2029

Project Director

Lotta Haikkola

Equality Transitions Work and livelihood

Doctor of Social Sciences, Docent
Academy Research Fellow
+358 44 4165 300
lotta.haikkola@youthresearch.fi

Profile of the researcher

Project Researchers