“Perseguindo os Ventos do Tempo”: jovens, passados compostos e futuros possíveis

Resumo

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.