Future subjects? education, activism and parental practices

This paper considers the ‘coming forward’ of certain classed subjects through the fields of education, parenting and activism. Questions of the future pose who, where and when questions: who is ‘stuck’ in the past, who is capacitated as taking ‘us’ forward, and what embodied, spatial and material collisions occur in these renderings of past-present-future? I locate feminist questions in educational trajectories, parental practices and forms of activism, and highlight the implicatedness of past and present in ‘travelling’ beyond research trajectories. As some are recognized as activating their own (and their families’) futures, others are condemned as failing, irresponsible and out-of-place. This is a distinctly classed process, witnessed in educational journeys and the parental - even activist - claims enacted therein. In these encounters, class 'sticks' as waste and as wrong, as a past residue attached to those behind the times and without worthy futures.