Our futures, third! Since 2022, Le Monde has been meeting you at the Champs Libres, in Rennes, as part of a festival which, as indicated by its theme in 2024, gives “a voice to the next generation”. In this context, we are offering you five debates, designed and hosted with a group of Rennes students, mainly from Sciences Po Rennes, but also from Rennes universities and the Institut Agro Rennes-Angers. The work accomplished with this collective allows us to offer you choices and approaches in line with the concerns of “generation Z” (born between the end of the 1990s and the 2000s). What does it tell us this year? Five anxieties and as many hopes.
The first subject – in order of appearance in the programming, and not in order of priority – concerns doubts, which do not only concern young people, about representative democracy, three months before the European elections. “Would losing interest in voting necessarily mean losing interest in politics? », asked the students who designed this subject. If it is true that asking a question is already answering it a little, we can bet that they will invite us to regenerate traditional democracy from the sources, not so new, which flourish around collectives of all kinds – associations, citizen conventions , Amap, groups carrying out civil disobedience actions, etc.
The fight against global warming will offer a second subject, from the angle of “an open debate on the solutions to adopt, which invites us to take an interest not only in the causes of climate change, but in all those who think about the way we are going to confront it.” The predation of natural resources will be held in the hot seat, while the notion of “Capitalocene” competes with that of “Anthropocene” to describe the era that humanity endures.
Contemporary with the birth of smartphones and social networks, but also continuous news channels, generation Z is “constantly bombarded by information and knowledge”, recalls the collective of students from Nos futures, who wanted to ask – this is our third theme – “whether we must have an opinion on everything, whether we have the right not to have an opinion or, on the contrary, whether we have a sort of moral duty not to be silent.”
The fourth theme selected was the subject of long and intense debates. It focuses both on the way the media treat working-class neighborhoods and on what these neighborhoods “have to tell us”, outside of periods when microphones and cameras are spontaneously turned on, as was the case last summer. , during the riots following the death of Nahel M., killed by a police officer in Nanterre during a road check. It is not insignificant that this subject is emerging as a fresco has just been unveiled in Nanterre in homage to Nahel M., a project carried out by young people from the Pablo-Picasso city and supervised by street educators.
Our cycle of debates will close on the question – and probably the questions – of feminism, for which young people have taken “the side of convening an intergenerational dialogue at the crossroads of different feminist currents, and of questioning the recent visibility of existing feminist currents yet since the 1970s.”
This rich programming, of course, does not exhaust all the concerns that affect young people, in particular that of their fragility and their anxieties about the future. The latest Public Health France barometer, made public on February 6, shows “a deterioration in the mental health of 18-24 year olds”. “You cannot imagine to what extent speeches of “despair” and fatalistic messages have consequences, at an age where we are building ourselves,” Charles-Edouard Notredame, psychiatrist at the university hospital center (CHU), told Le Monde. from Lille.
The hope of the Our Futures festival – the name of the event was found three years ago by students – is that young people carry part of the antidote. This is evidenced by the pugnacious concern of the students with whom we worked to seek, on all subjects, to highlight the actions and reflections which, in the field as in the world of research, shape happier tomorrows. .
