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

FREYTES FREY, ADA; CECILIA CROSS

Action Research

Sage Publications

Lugar: London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi; Año: 2011 vol. 9 p. 65 - 82

1476-7503

Participatory action research (PAR) involves collaborative construction of knowledgeamong researchers and local actors. Collaboration is particularly challenging forresearchers when working with subaltern populations, as we experienced in a PARproject shared with young people living in extreme poverty in the Greater Buenos Airesarea. The objective was to promote educational rights, based on a participatorydiagnosis of factors associated with school abandonment. The main challenge wasyoung people?s reluctance to address their school experience, due to stigmatizationprocesses associated with school failure. Video production and dramatization helped usto overcome this blockage and to make youth perspectives visible to other social actorsin the educational field. The paper discusses how this happened during the PARprocess.