On the occasion of the publication of the latest book in Spanish by José
Machado Pais (Youth and creativity, 2020), this conversation with Carles Feixa
reviews the personal and intellectual career of this Portuguese sociologist, one
of the leaders in youth studies in Europe and Latin America. After evoking the
teenage and youth of the protagonist in Portugal in the 1970s —around the red
carnation revolution of 1974 that ended the Salazarist dictatorship— and
reviewing his academic influences, the text focuses on his contributions to the
study of Portuguese and later European youth, as well as their connections with
researchers from Brazil and Latin America. In the final part of the article he
exposes the origin and content of the last of his books, in which he gathers five
fundamental essays on youth creativity. This search for «the winds of time»
does not imply any value judgment on young people in general or on a
generation in particular, but rather an epistemological bet to reveal the hidden
faces of a social emergency, projecting towards the future —or towards the no
future— the complexities of the past.
Keywords:
youth, juvenology, Portugal, creativity, time, future
Author Biographies
José Machado País, Universidade de Lisboa
Sociólogo del Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa. Correo electrónico: machado.pais@ics.ulisboa.pt
Carles Feixa Pàmpols, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Antropólogo de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Correo electrónico: carles.feixa@upf.edu
Machado País, J., & Feixa Pàmpols, C. (2020). Chasing the winds of time. Youth, compound pasts and possible futures. Última Década, 28(53), pp. 235–252. Retrieved from https://ultimadecada.uchile.cl/index.php/UD/article/view/58455