Paper short abstract:

Drawing on collaborative research with young Aymara women from El Alto, we will share scenes from a short film currently in the making. We discuss emerging visions encompassing embodied and affective experiences, political horizons and potential urban transformations as seen through a youth lens.

Paper long abstract:

Bolivia is renown internationally for promoting indigenous rights, post-neoliberal development and decolonisation in its 2009 constitution. Research to date, however, highlights gaps between legal rhetoric and practice, emphasising how Bolivia’s government continues with extractivist development and reproduces colonial imaginaries. In addition to being denied from indigenous rights and experiencing ethno-racial discrimination, urban indigenous youths currently confront a domestic crisis exacerbated by the global pandemic. Yet, through everyday struggle and endurance, efforts to combine modern urban culture with Aymara language and tradition, and dreams for anti-racist and ecological forms of urban co-habitation, they are capable of challenging inequalities and racialisation, confronting hardships with their own future imaginations.

In this intervention, we draw on collaborative research with four young Aymara women from El Alto with whom we deployed participatory video-making as a tool to articulate and enact youth problems and visions. Against an affectively and politically charged urban landscape, we seek to explore how collaborative video and the making of docu-fiction can catalyse different ways of being in the city, opening up possibilities for new kinds of politics, and alternative ways of envisioning the future. We will share scenes from a short film currently in the making, reflecting on the adopted methodology that combines insights from popular education, ethnography, participatory action research, docu-fiction making and visual anthropology. Based on the film scenes, we will reflect on urban youth visions encompassing embodied and affective experiences, political horizons and potential urban transformations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the unfinished journeys of hope(s) through an analysis of interviews conducted with black queer urban youth in Johannesburg. It shows how black queer urban youth in Johannesburg inhabit the city physically, and how their experiences of the city are informed by multiple presences

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the unfinished journeys of hopes through an analysis of interviews conducted with black queer urban youth living in Johannesburg. The paper uses translocality and affect theories to show how black queer urban youth living in Johannesburg inhabit the city physically, and how their experiences of the city are informed by multiple presences. The paper argues that the interviewed participants do not necessarily explain or understand their existence across the city solely based on tangible characteristics such as the materiality of space, but also through a variety of affects. These affects include feeling joy, sadness, wanted, unwanted, hopeful, resilient or inspired, among a whole array of other feelings. All these feelings have an impact on how participants experience present home(s), hope(s) and their imaginations for the future. The paper also acknowledges the existence of liminality, suspension and waiting in quotidian accounts of selected black queer people in the city. These dynamics are much more prevalent among trans youth.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on young indigenous students in Peru who engage with political, environmental, and social youth organizations, arguing that activism represents a crucial learning process that has a transformative power over the personal development of the urban Amazonian youth.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonia, my paper focuses on young indigenous people who move to the city to pursue higher education. Young indigenous Amazonians are often invested, by their families and society at large, with the moral duty to become professionals while also carry on their elders’ cultural heritage. At the same time, their education, inside and outside formal institutions, raises fears of cultural loss and concerns that deference to scientific notions might erase indigenous forms of knowledge, along with traditional customs and values. Therefore, I explore how young Amazonian women and men become socialised persons through the acquisition of different forms of knowledge, both inside and outside academic settings in the city.

Notably, during their studies, many young Amazonians join or form political, environmental, and social youth organizations. These organizations attempt to combine scientific and traditional knowledge in order to deal with the new social and cultural changes brought about by urban life and higher education, as well as with long-term processes of political, economic, and socio-cultural marginalization. Thus, my paper expands existing anthropological debates on indigenous youth education by characterizing the forming and participating in various kinds of organizations as a crucial learning process that challenges young indigenous peoples’ key moral and cultural values, alongside with their hopes and aspirations for the future. Through a framework of knowledge as mediation, I argue that living, studying, and becoming activists in the city has a transformative power over the personal development of young urban Amazonians.

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes that we consider gentrification as a process of uncommoning in the Anthropocene. It examines the effects of the gentrification of activism on alternative urban visions of youth identity and community in late capitalism produced through processes of commoning in a Nicosian public square, and the subsequent erosion of youth ecology.

Paper long abstract:

The paper aims to explore the gentrification of antiauthoritarian activist areas, as key areas of production of commons. It proposes that we consider gentrification as part of the multiple crises we are experiencing and as an act of uncommoning. An act that threatens and eventually dismantles processes of commoning within the areas earmarked for urban regeneration producing in this sense new enclosures. The idea proposed emerged through extended ethnographic fieldwork with an antiauthoritarian community of Cypriot activist youth and their occupation of public space in the city of Nicosia that formed the basis for the production of new commons involving processes and projects of de-alienation of youth from nationalist and neoliberal narratives, as well as production of community that could sustain collective and alternative forms of youth identity within late capitalism. Urban regeneration projects, however, appropriating the language of 'common good', 'development' and 'growth' led to a dismantling of the community produced, and consequently, of visions of 'youth' beyond individualistic and 'empowered' subjectivities. The paper attempts to bring together literatures on gentrification and on youth movement activism and explore their entanglement through the lens of commoning and uncommoning. It further aims to reflect of how such processes influence the already fragile ecology of youth on a worldwide scale, given that gentrification processes have been recognized as a global form of urban management. Such processes assumingly alleviate Anthropocene effects through, among other, sustainable engineering projects while, however, exacerbating inequalities and threatening visions of alternative futures that activist youth communities embrace.