Overcoming poor youth stigmatization and invisibility through art: A participatory action research experience in Greater Buenos Aires

Participatory Action Research (PAR) involves collaborative construction of knowledge among researchers and local actors. Collaboration is particularly challenging for researchers when working with subaltern populations, as we experienced in a PAR project shared with young people living in extreme poverty in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The objective was to promote educational rights, based on a participatory diagnosis of factors associated with school abandonment. The main challenge was young people’s reluctance to address their school experience, due to stigmatization processes associated with school failure. Video production and dramatization helped us to overcome this blockage and to make youth perspectives visible to other social actors in the educational field. The article discusses how this happened during the PAR process.