Eryn Berger

ERYN FE SNYDER BERGER, then a graduate student at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded funding to aid research on ‘Afrodescendant Youth, Cultural Citizenship, and the Promise of Media Democracy in Argentina,’ supervised by Dr. Paul B. Garrett. In 2005, the Argentine state advanced a ‘National Plan against Discrimination’ that denounced ‘ethnic nationalism’ in education (INADI 2005), but this has led to few institutional changes. Classrooms remain principle sites where Afrodescendant youth encounter various forms of racialization and exclusion, from Eurocentric history textbooks to peer bullying. However, outside the classroom, growing transnational Afrodescendant social movements have opened up new spaces for youth to develop critical consciousness and advocate for their cultural belonging and political rights. Based on twelve months of ethnographic and youth participatory action research with an Afrodescendant youth organization in Buenos Aires, this dissertation explores how involvement with Afro-diasporic community-based activism provides youth an ‘alternative citizenship education.’ While their classrooms are imbued with racializing practices and national narratives that place Afrodescendants outside the nation, youth are learning to craft broader definitions of Argentine citizenship through praxis-based learning in their community. Amid the shifting national policies and racial ideologies of contemporary Argentina, this research examines Afrodescendant youth civic identity formation across institutional and community-based educational environments, where young people are emerging as important interlocutors in the relationship between the state and Afro-diasporic communities.