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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, and to see the links to virtual rooms. Log in
Accepted Paper:
Sophie Legros (London School of Economics and Political Science)
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, -