Citizenship Experiences in Youth Inclusion Programs in Argentina

MARINA MEDAN

Melbourne

Congreso; XX ISA Congress; 2023

ISA

Stimulating youth “participation” is one of the objectives of social inclusion programs aimed at young people living in poverty in Argentina. These participatory practices can involve various forms: attending a woodworking workshop or tutoring classes, joining a football team, helping with the community dining room service, leading a community project, or just to hang out with friends at the program headquarters, instead of being “at the corner”.Beyond their heterogeneity, these practices imply a "stay" in an institutional space that seeks to promote and restore human rights to a highly vulnerable population. Thus, “to stay” in these spaces would potentially have a citizen-building effect.Based on a collaborative research work in one of these youth inclusion programs in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we wonder about the processes of learning democratic values that are possible in programs that are implemented in contexts marked by large inequalities. Access to be well treated, the audibility of demands, and intergenerational respect, stand out as a key condition of possibility not only for the exercise of “invited participation” (Cornwall, 2008), but also for the gestation of feelings of membership in institutional spaces. In the argument, we assume an experiential definition of citizenship (Lister, 2007), and distance ourselves from normative approaches for the public policies study. Based on the findings, we point out the implications that some of these participatory processes have for the formulation of public policies.