A tale of two stories: Honduran youth at the intersection of migration and a digital society

• In Event: Youth, education, and digital tools: global perspectives on connection, migration, and learning

Proposal

Relevance/Purpose
Envisioning Education in a Digital Society addressed in the 2025 CIES conference is at the foundation of the lived experience of youth in rural Honduras. In authoritative circumstances, curiosity is silenced (Freire, 1998); discrimination, poverty, and injustice abound. The goal of improving education for a more equitable world, begins with examining power dynamics which underlie injustice. There is an ever-increasing migration of unaccompanied youth from Central America to the United States. It is essential to examine the experiences of these youth and the role digital advancements. A tale of two stories this paper documents two Honduran youth at the intersection of migration and a digital society. Both originating from the coffee region of Honduras in the midst of increasing political instabilities, pandilla violence, and escalating economic, political, and health-care crises.

Context/Conceptual framework
Employing de/colonizing feminist epistemologies, this study examines the gap in literature exploring lived experiences to better understand youth’s resistance, struggle, defiance, and compliance with the rapidly evolving landscape of education to support student learning across the globe. I argue that dominant eurocentric ways of knowing and being take a backseat and examine a pluriverse of onto-epistemologies that center marginalized ways of knowing. Arturo Escobar (Escobar, 2020a), a Colombian scholar, argues a Pluriversality, an existence of multiple realities and ways of knowing. “Pluriversality is not cultural relativism, but entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential.” (Mignolo, 2018, p. x).
Honduras, a country filled with natural and cultural diversity gained its independence from Spain mere 200 years ago and shortly thereafter began formal relations with the United States. The US intervened in numerous pollical affairs to protect a neo-liberal agendas and corporate interests. Colonized into western eurocentric epistemologies, these became the foundation of the current social and political systems in Honduras. Indigenous ways of knowing were, and continue to be, severely marginalized and discriminated against. Coloniality robbed groups of people of their land and stole others from their lands to enslave them. The power differential allowed for colonial epistemologies alongside an epistemicide of non-Western thought or ways of knowing. “That power differential is the logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity” (Mignolo, 2018, p. x). The drive to pursue a “better” life in the “north” (USA) remains at the forefront of the narrative for youth in Honduras.
Pluriversality is employed in this paper as a framework for analysis in this study that uncovers how residual colonial power struggles are at the core of these youth’s socio-economic, education, and mental health crises. Pluriversality provides a theoretical framework as a resource to understand their struggle and the role digital advancement have in their experiences.

Inquiry/Research design
A qualitative critical ethnography (Kapoor, 2017), this study combines the heart with the mind, senti-pensar (feeling-thinking) to address the two youth’s embodied experiences (Escobar, 2020b) of migration and the role of digital advancements. Critical posthuman scholarship (Braidotti, 2013/2019) de-centers the notion of the human as the central actor in the world, and instead, offers the unit of assemblage, or multiplicity, or collective, as a central referent. An assemblage refers to a set of elements—humans, things, ideas, physical settings, and so on—that come into composition and produce something (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Digital resources are evolving the ways migration and education are encountered. The assemblage of migrant youth arrive unaccompanied in the US from Central America is evolving through digital interfaces.
Over the course of the study, in-depth interviews and extended observations were collected with two teenage youth from Honduras who migrated to the US unaccompanied. Interdisciplinary and collaborative, the local contexts and experiences are examined with an analysis of the reality of systemic oppression within a colonial legacy. Informing the development of the study’s research questions, I made connections, built relationships, and conducted conversations as an outsider. I asked participants what they desired and how I could contribute. Author positionality is discussed in the full paper. Thematic coding and analysis was completed in Spanish before translated into English.

Findings
This study explores the lived experiences of two Honduran youth and their recent experiences migrating to the US and what role does digital advancements play in their experience. The youth describe systemic inequalities, access to food and water, mental health, sexual sigma, traumas, racism, classism, access to quality education and challenging poverty conditions and the urgency to find work. A more digital society breaks down barriers but also creates others that reproduce inequities of unbalanced power dynamics that extend to education access and economic opportunities (Stromquist, 2001). Additional factors impacting their perception of personal agency include being among the first in their family to purse social efficiency and education through coming to the US amidst rampant nepotism that prevents qualified individuals from obtaining secure employment in Honduras.
Acknowledging political and social implications of colonial efforts of epistemicide in Honduras sheds light on the resistance and struggles of the youth in this study face to experience greater agency in their lives. Digital advances play a significant role in education opportunities post-pandemic and the assemblaging of community efforts to reach the north (US) despite grave dangers. The full paper describes these and additional findings of their resistance and struggle in an ever-evolving digital society.

Contribution
The significance of this research is situated within the pursuit of a more just world; to identify and understand inequalities, interrogate hegemonic colonial oppression, and explore sustainable solutions to improve the lives of the vulnerable population of youth in this study by exploring their agency and resistance to oppression. The intersection of a digital society and migration is of utmost urgency.
This study adds to the literature addressing culturally-relevant and sustainable development and research regarding opportunities for cooperation between government and non-governmental organizations and national and international policymakers to explore solutions for these most vulnerable populations. The dissemination of this study elevates the voices of the youth who collaborated in the study and informs community-based NGO projects and the broader society.

Author

• Laura A Edwards, Northern Kentucky University