Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Abstract

How do young people living in high-violence contexts express a sense of democratic agency and hope, and/or frustration and hopelessness, for handling various kinds of social and political conflict problems? The management of conflict is a core challenge and purpose of democracy, severely impeded by the isolation and distrust caused by violence. Publicly funded schools can be (but often are not) part of the solution to such challenges (Bickmore, 2014; Davies, 2011). This article is drawn from a larger on-going project probing the (mis)fit between young people’s lived citizenship and conflict experiences, and their school-based opportunities to develop democratic peace-building capacities, in non-affluent local contexts surrounded by violence, in an international comparative perspective. We report on focus group conversations with several small groups of students, ages 10–15, in two Canadian and four Mexican schools in marginalized urban areas. Diverse participating young people tended to have a stronger sense of agency and hope in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as environmental pollution) compared to others (such as unemployment and insecure work or drug-gang violence). In general, they did not feel that their lived citizenship knowledge was much valued or built upon in school.