Four 23-year-old gap year students have been traveling around France in a converted van. Their goal is to ask those they meet how they plan for the future and what they perceive.
Eulalie, one of the students participating in the “In search of hope” project, tells us why the four of them left. “The future is not just about technology, AI and robots! When we think about the future, what comes to us? What makes us want, what scares us?” she says. The project is part of the M1 to M2 gap year course at the Sorbonne University of Paris, which runs from February to May. The students hope to bring out hope and build a discourse around the future of France, other than catastrophism, even if they can understand it, they say. They say they have developed a methodology to carry out a survey that is sociologically valid, even though it remains qualitative. They stop for two weeks in each region, each time with one city per week.