Intergenerational relations have long been theorized as sites of friction and continuity. Karl Mannheim (1952) argues that generations exist only in relation to one another, continually shaped through interaction rather than as discrete, self-contained cohorts. Cultural sociologists have since emphasized culture's role in shaping generations (Eyerman and Turner, 1998). For Bourdieu (1993), generational conflict is a clash between the expectations and aspirations of the young and the old. Ken Plummer (2010) calls attention to the interpretive labor required to grasp how the idioms of successive generations interpenetrate within the same historical present. Generational identity is therefore never only chronological—a matter of birth cohort or life stage—but also relational, produced through encounters between generations, and renegotiated across historical, cultural, and narrative contexts.

This seminar proposes to bring critical aging studies into sustained dialogue with childhood and youth studies, treating the three not as separate fields but as mutually constitutive discourses organized around interdependence, tension, and the transmission of stories, memory, values, and cultural forms across generations. Rather than treating intergenerationality simply as a theme, we approach it as a comparative framework for asking how literary and cultural forms mediate, imagine, and remake relations between generations. How do they shape care, vulnerability, and ethical obligation? Vulnerability, in this view, is not a fixed attribute of any single life stage but produced, negotiated, and redistributed through intergenerational relationships and the social, political, and cultural structures in which they unfold. We are equally interested in inheritance in its material, cultural, and affective dimensions—not only property, wealth, and legacy, but also the transmission of language, stories, memory, trauma, values, and ways of knowing across generational lines. How do cultural texts imagine what is owed between generations, and what happens when inheritance is refused, interrupted, or contested?

We invite papers that read chronologically—tracing life-course trajectories from childhood, through youth, to old age—but also generationally, attending to frictions and solidarities between cohorts living through the same historical moment differently. Possible topics include: genre and intergenerational storytelling; translation, adaptation and cultural transmission; caregiving across the life course; intergenerational dependency and care as sites of ethical and political theorizing; inheritance, property, and dispossession; the transmission of trauma and memory; generational conflict and solidarity in transnational or diasporic contexts; childhood and old age as mirrored or entangled figures; posthumous or intergenerational address in narrative form; and other comparative approaches placing childhood, youth, and aging studies in explicit conversation.