Unstable Identities

In Southern Europe there’s a specific issue regarding young people – the focus of our overheated identities. Not only do youth unemployment rates in the Mediterranean remain among the highest in Europe, but these countries also perform poorly in at least two of the three dimensions of job quality, which are: the quality of earnings, or the extent to which workers’ earnings from their job contribute to their well-being; labor market security; and the quality of the working environment (OECD, Society at a glance 2019, 2019). Like Spain and Greece, Italy is always at the top of the Eurostat tables for important problems (see NEET rates: with the pandemic, the number of young people aged 15–29 who are not in education, employment or training in Italy increased from 22.1 percent in 2019 to 23.3 percent in 2020 and 24 percent in 2021 There are more than two million NEETs in Italy - boys and girls who are neither studying nor working and more than 97,000 young people have left their work or study paths in the last year. What we would like to reflect on is “unstable identities” (Eriksen, Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change, 2016a; Eriksen, History and Anthropology, 27(5):469–487, 2016b, Eriksen, Culturologia: The Journal of Culture, 4(1):2–11, 2016c, Eriksen, Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change, 2016d, Eriksen, History and Anthropology, 27(5):469–487, 2016e), and how “stable identities” can be constructed in overheating societies – starting from young people and the difficulty of becoming adults in southern Europe. But the conversation will go also beyond that.