Inquiring Agency Beyond Resistance: Responsible Citizenship, Participation, and Technologies of the Self

• In Event: Moving Through/to Possibilities: Navigating Uncertainties, Pathologies, and Anxieties in Troubling Times

Abstract

This ethnographic genealogy examines the way a group of Latina girls attending a high school in a neighborhood in Madrid (Spain) responded to instances of sexual harassment in school. I probe how the bodily capacities (technologies of the body) that girls develop to attain a sense of plenitude cannot be dissociated from the cultural logics of the regime of conviviality where dissent is displaced from democratic school culture in favor of a rational set of rules. I focus on the 2000s, when anxieties about students’ participation have re-emerged in curriculum reform both in the European Union and in Spain—e.g., Education for Citizenship—and youth’s ‘political and civic apathy’ has been problematized as a threat to social cohesion and conviviality.

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, San Diego State University