Overcoming poor youth stigmatization and invisibility through art: A Participatory Action Research experience in Greater Buenos Aires

FREYTES FREY, ADA; CROSS, CECILIA

Action Research

Sage Publications

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2011 vol. 9 p. 65 - 82

1476-7503

Participatory action research (PAR) involves collaborative construction of knowledge among researchers and local actors. Collaboration is particularly challenging for researchers when working with subaltern populations, as we experienced in a PAR project shared with young people living in extreme poverty in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The objective was to promote educational rights, based on a participatory diagnosis of aspects associated with school abandonment. The main challenge was young people´s reluctance to address their school experience, due to stigmatization processes associated with school failure. To overcome this blocking we appealed to arts: dramatization and video production. Our most important findings are that these forms of expression through art: first, favored the implication and participation of the young men and women we worked with in the action research process; second, they allowed the manifestation of their experiences, formerly blocked by stigmatization processes; third, they were a potent instrument to make the perspectives of these young men and women visible to other social actors concerned by this problematic (teachers, government officers, parents).