Description
This paper examines the complex dynamics of youth agency in violent contexts and considers the transformational potential of educational environments against the backdrop of a community history of multiple forms of violence. Based on a qualitative longitudinal analysis of young people’s trajectories engaged in community sports programmes in a Brazilian slum neighbourhood, we investigate how they develop strategies to deal with violence and create alternative future pathways. We adopted a sociocultural-historical approach to data analysis focused on the youth’s strategies to develop resilience and resistance to neighbourhood violence, how these changed through time and were related to participation in educational sports programmes. The results demonstrate the importance of developing a highly tuned set of different levels of (perceived) agency. As youth came to understand violence in the neighbourhood as largely beyond their control, they altered their strategies to negotiate related external constraints in order to nevertheless make a future for themselves. Encouraged by a shared moral discourse, their participation in sports education fostered not only individual agency, but also provided a collective resource for resilience and resistance towards violence and social stigma attached to the neighbourhood. Following Freire’s (1994) reflections and related dynamic perspectives on agency (Evans, 2007; Bisgaard, 2021), we interpret their strategies for resilience as acts of resistance, directed at re-creating their environment and future prospects. Finally, the paper considers how educational (sports) interventions that are created bottom-up and address the community context can enhance opportunities for agency to overcome structural constraints and challenge disempowering social systems.| Period | 30 Aug 2024 |
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| Event title | ISCAR 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Rotterdam, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |