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Accepted Paper
Youth in Medellín's Urban Periphery: 'Unyielding Hopefulness' Against Inconsistent Temporalities of Everyday Life.
Sophie Legros
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract
Under the restless pace of urban informality, Medellín's youth tackle insecurity by embodying 'unyielding hopefulness' in family-building, labour market interactions, and social participation. Their actions challenge the gender order, narco-trafficking's influence, and the elite's model of progress.
Paper long abstract
Medellín's youth are caught between "waithood" and "busyness": waiting for crucial life stages that should enable social mobility - university graduation, stable employment, home ownership - while rushing to meet family and economic obligations and participate in short-lived opportunities offered by the city's insufficient investments in education and citizenship participation. The contradictory nature of these states creates profound anxieties.
Yet, youth refuse victimhood-status through 'unyielding hopefulness', expanding notions of what is possible delimited by exclusion and social inequalities. They respond to overlapping crises and envision a dignified life:
- In intimate relationships, reshaping the traditional family model, imagining the couple as a partnership rather than male authority and female subservience. Youth as parents interrogate the role of fathers and socialise their children into more egalitarian gender norms.
- In interactions with labour markets, what appears as a lack of reliability to employers is rather a form of resistance to casualisation, flexibility as a strategy against chronic unpredictability.
- In their social participation, youth generate actions founded on self-governance, mentoring, and remembering that serve as accountability mechanisms to the clientelistic culture of government-provided opportunities, gaining purpose unobtainable through precarious work. Managing limited resources, they mobilise the pool of neglected talents in Medellín's periphery, demanding a reassessment of where innovation truly lies.
Through these actions, youth challenge narco-trafficking's penetrating influence, aggressive masculine identities, and exclusionary models of development. This emphasises the pace of urban life under informality, the disruptive practices youth employ as a response, and gendered dimensions of these processes.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality. Log in
Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
Paper long abstract
Medellín's youth are caught between "waithood" and "busyness": waiting for crucial life stages that should enable social mobility - university graduation, stable employment, home ownership - while rushing to meet family and economic obligations and participate in short-lived opportunities offered by the city's insufficient investments in education and citizenship participation. The contradictory nature of these states creates profound anxieties.
Yet, youth refuse victimhood-status through 'unyielding hopefulness', expanding notions of what is possible delimited by exclusion and social inequalities. They respond to overlapping crises and envision a dignified life:
- In intimate relationships, reshaping the traditional family model, imagining the couple as a partnership rather than male authority and female subservience. Youth as parents interrogate the role of fathers and socialise their children into more egalitarian gender norms.
- In interactions with labour markets, what appears as a lack of reliability to employers is rather a form of resistance to casualisation, flexibility as a strategy against chronic unpredictability.
- In their social participation, youth generate actions founded on self-governance, mentoring, and remembering that serve as accountability mechanisms to the clientelistic culture of government-provided opportunities, gaining purpose unobtainable through precarious work. Managing limited resources, they mobilise the pool of neglected talents in Medellín's periphery, demanding a reassessment of where innovation truly lies.
Through these actions, youth challenge narco-trafficking's penetrating influence, aggressive masculine identities, and exclusionary models of development. This emphasises the pace of urban life under informality, the disruptive practices youth employ as a response, and gendered dimensions of these processes.
Alternatives to urban development: Youths between multiple crisis and future visions
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -