The future is commonly imagined as a time ahead of us, separate from the past and not yet reached by the present. This typical temporal image is accompanied by a linear conception of generations. In this construction, knowledge and wisdom are understood to move in one direction, from older to younger people.
The papers gathered here in Vol. 14 of Journal of Dialogue Studies unsettle these assumptions about time. Across diverse geographical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts, they show how the past can remain active in communal memories and silences, human bodies, cultural narratives, social structures, and institutional practices, as well as in the more-than-human worlds. They also suggest that futures already orient relationships and action in the present. Taken together, these contributions invite us to reconceptualise intergenerational dialogue beyond the transmission of a completed inheritance. As a relational process, intergenerational dialogue allows memories, wounds, wisdom, and hopes to be received, questioned, refused, renewed, and transformed.
This editorial first reconsiders what is meant by intergenerational dialogue and argues that relations across generations stretch conventional assumptions of co-presence and reciprocity, while the characterisation of generation itself defies chronological age. It then develops futures-forming as a conceptual framework for understanding how inherited conditions, present challenges, and anticipated possibilities interact. According to the articles, effects of intergenerational dialogue are neither ensured nor inherently benign, and the encounter itself carries no guarantee of repair. What it does bring into view is where hope resides. Hope may be felt by individuals and communities, but the conditions that sustain or interrupt hope are structural, relational, and active: what seems possible depends upon whether we listen, whether institutions recognise our claims, and whether inherited practices remain available to draw upon.
