The goodies and baddies: representations on the young and youth in Argentina.

CHAVES, MARIANA

Gammarth

Conferencia; 10th International Conference on Social Representations; 2010

Département de Psychologie Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines de Tunis

The purpose of this article is to analyse the social representations which set out various social actors in relation to young men and women and youth in general and -in particular- to distinguish the classifications that are used to describe them. Firstly, we are interested, on the one hand, on those moral terms that characterise mainly two types of subjects: ?the goodies? and ?the baddies?. Secondly,   the strategies for the construction of stereotypes, stigmas and/or prejudices are compared with respect to social classes, genders, ages, territories and cultural styles of the subject represented. Thirdly, we focus on how the representations about youth are related with time, mainly the dichotomy day and night. The intergroup relationships, through the study of social representations, allow analysing the constitution of collective identities, spatio-temporal circuits, processes of segregation and discrimination, and tensions in the social trajectories.The representations of oneself, of the peer and the stranger, are the analytical dimensions in order to get insight on the discourses of the selected social actors and, thus to interpret these representations. The corpus of analysis consists of two kinds of texts. One group encompasses those discourses obtained in the ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of La Plata and Villa Maria, Argentina, where young people and adults (parents, teachers, agents of the state) were interviewed. The second group of texts are derived from newspapers. The analysis of the media has become extremely relevant to understand the visibility and interpretations about the youth in the public space. In both corpora, the discourse analysis method based on semiotics of enunciations was applied.