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.