Cultivating hope: children and youth participation in collective memory in post-accord Colombia

This dissertation takes children and youth participation in peacebuilding as a node for studying how processes of collective memory affect young people’s self-constructions and political identities in a transitional context. Although much has been written about the Colombian armed conflict, children's perspectives on their participation in collective and historical memory during the post-accord has seldom been the focus of academic research. Furthermore, the dissertation analyzes how understandings of childhood as a pre-political stage defined by its futurity, is affected by children’s and youth’s reconstruction of a protracted, violent, past. My ethnography fills this important gap in existing research and focuses on understanding the participation of children and youth in collective memory in both rural and urban contexts in Colombia. To do so, I analyze how the young museum workers of Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín, exercise the pedagogical technique of diálogos de saberes (knowledge dialogues) as a way to engage the children and the youth visiting as part of the Peace Chair. These dialogues represent the museum’s peace pedagogy and its educational goal of humanizing the conflict while engaging children in historical and political literacy. The museum proposes the methodology of living memory as a solution to children’s and youth’s participation in the reconstruction of the past without discussing the graphic details of the violence that victims have suffered. Living memory is then, a continuation of collective memory in which children and young people can participate in the reconstruction of the past, regardless of their victimhood status. The dialogues also allow for an interpretation of the role that the figure of the victim plays in the reconstruction of the past. Children and youth would often express that “we are all victims of the conflict” as a way to insert themselves as members of a marginalized community that due to the post-accord context, has gained great visibility and political agency in Colombia. This dissertation also grapples with how, in contexts of high intensity violence, like San Carlos, children’s identity is seldom about reaffirming their status as children. Rather collective constructions of the self, such as being campesino¸ are reinforced.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference