Images of the future and temporal complexity among young adult asylum seekers and refugees in Finland

This study examines the effect of complex temporal experiences, shaped by interrupted pasts and uncertain presents, on young adult asylum seekers and refugees’ capacity to envision and engage with possible futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it investigates how participants of the study navigate disrupted histories, legal precarity, and their sense of belonging and emotional uncertainty while imagining and negotiating future trajectories. Rather than approaching time as linear or fragmented, the analysis highlights its entangled and affective nature: the past emerges as both burden and resource, the present as constrained yet hopeful, and the future as fragile but not foreclosed. The findings challenge normative models of future planning that presume individual autonomy and stable life conditions, underscoring the need for futures work that attends to structural conditions and temporal complexity. Restoring personal agency, through legal recognition or the ability to shape one’s own life, emerges as a key to the future, unlocking possibilities where only barriers seemed to exist. By centering the lived experiences of young adult asylum seekers and refugees, the study contributes to more just and inclusive approaches in futures research, policy, and practice, grounded in relational, situated, and socially embedded understandings of temporality and futurity.