Childhood Geography from the South: the right to participation of children living in rural settings

MIKKELSEN, C.

Redefining Children`s Participation in the countries of the South

J. B. Metzler

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2022; p. 105 - 117

Rurality in Latin America is characterized by its variety of actors and its ability to act in a territory, it is where farmers, small and medium-sized producers, large producers, transnational companies, and agribusiness meet. "Traditional" actors to whom arriving urban population incorporates. It is an emerging process linked to the search for security, peace, closer to nature environments, with the opportunity of access to the purchase of a house, or simply concluding the life cycle. Rurality begins to be viewed an alternative lifestyle and even a way to enjoy free time.Therefore, rurality becomes a disputed territory for various subjects with unequal ties with the territory. Overlapping actors and action capabilities result in a complex, coincident, and stressing construction. Within this framework. it is of interest to retrieve the perspective of those who are part of such dynamic. Especially, understanding rural population not as residual, separate, and remote, but as part of the whole, as actors present in decision-making and in concrete connection with local rural territory and global dynamics. Particularly inside all rural inhabitants it is important to reflect around rural children, to the sense and significance of inhabiting rural territories from the voices of children and adolescents.It is consequently our aim to contribute to the discussion of rurality expressed specifically in the protagonists of Latin American children and adolescents as subjects with rights, based on their chances of participation in the search to reduce the gaps between rural and urban children.Methodologically, the analysis of specialized literature, the systematization of children´s reports in Latin America, and the concrete review of examples from the Southern Cone are used. Providing from this to the studies of the Geography of Children from a local understanding.