Online Workshop
The Future is Now!?
Youth, Intergenerational Relations and Social Change in Laos
11-12 September 2025
Demographically, Laos remains a very young country with over half the population younger than 25 years of age. Whilst voices of young people often remain excluded from decision-making processes in Laos at all scales and are not receiving much attention in research, their practices have been key drivers of social change in Laos.
In this workshop, we explore changing practices of young people in Laos. These include their involvement in internal and international migration, their career paths and educational journeys, and their engagement with newly emerging economic opportunities (ranging from SEZs, gig work and digital trade) with effects on intergenerational relations (Huijsmans 2019; Lutz 2021). Young people are also at the forefront of an expanding creative scene and shape the digital social space through their social media ‘prosumption’ (Huijsmans 2022; Lutz 2024). Furthermore, some decide to leave school earlier and to marry younger; marriage partners from abroad are considered increasingly (Hancart Petitet and Phetchanpheng 2022; Stolz 2021). Apart from migration, these phenomena have hardly received any scholarly attention and enter public discourse typically as alarming developments that must be addressed (see the Lao Social Indicators Survey III). Arguably, these phenomena highlight young people’s engagement with a future that they do not wish to wait for any longer.
This workshop is intended to firm up our empirical understanding on Lao youth and their future-making practices, and to reflect on their social effects and implications for social change and continuity.
Convenors:
Roy Huijsmans, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Netherlands
Rosalie Stolz, Global South Studies Center (GSSC), University of Cologne, Germany
Contact::
rosalie.stolz@uni-koeln.de
huijsmans@iss.nl