Prof. Dr. Özgehan Şenyuva (Middle East Technical University, Ankara) walked onto the stage with a confession: he is not a sociologist. He is a political scientist who used to be a youth worker and is now, depending on the room, asked to give shorter and shorter keynotes. The room laughed – not just at the self-deprecation, but because everyone recognised the feeling. Roles shift, contexts change and before you know it the ground you’ve been standing on has moved. That drift, it turned out, was exactly his subject.
He started his presentation with a provocation disguised as a vocabulary lesson. He gave the audience three words: plurigenerational, transgenerational, intergenerational, and asked them to consider whether the work they do under the banner of the third actually belongs under the first.
Plurigenerational, he explained, is a shopping mall. Different generations present in the same space, no sustained interaction. Transgenerational is the family dinner table where things such as values, recipes and traumas are handed down across generations. Intergenerational is something else entirely. It is a deliberate, designed encounter between people of different ages who choose to work together on something that matters to all of them, and who stay in the room even when the work gets uncomfortable. Most of what the youth sector calls intergenerational, Şenyuva argued, is in fact a well-funded plurigenerational arrangement. As he put it: a photograph of a teenager next to an elderly pensioner is not solidarity. It’s geography.
This distinction matters because it changes what we invest in. If we think putting different age groups in the same room is enough, we stop there. If we accept that real exchange requires design, structured processes, shared tasks, time to build trust and navigate disagreement, then we build programmes very differently.
Drawing on sociological research, Şenyuva challenged the common assumption that good dialogue leads to understanding, which leads to solidarity. In reality, he argued, solidarity, conflict and ambivalence don’t come in stages – they coexist all the time. Disagreement in intergenerational work is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that something real is happening. “Two people who have stayed in a room through a real disagreement and emerged still in a relationship have something stronger than two polite people who only shared pleasantries.”
He also warned against letting age become the only lens. A twenty-two-year-old unemployed person in Barcelona, he pointed out, has more in common with a seventy-year-old pensioner without housing in the same city than with a twenty-year-old trust-fund kid in Dubai. Generation is never the only thing going on but class, gender, migration status and race cut across every generational story, and programmes that treat “young” and “old” as the only categories miss most of what is actually happening in the room.
As these pressures grow, he argued, youth workers will increasingly find themselves doing community work – working not only with young people, but with entire families, neighbourhoods and age groups, because the problems young people face do not stop at the door of the youth centre. Whether or not the sector is ready for that shift, it is already happening.
The audience response was a mix of recognition and discomfort, exactly, Şenyuva suggested, what a good intergenerational encounter should produce.
Find Ozgehan’s PowerPoint presentation here.