| Summary: | "In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala's civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country's history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy. Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised"--
"This book centers on the lives of young people in the violent aftermath of Guatemala's civil war. Once cast as ambassadors of the postwar peace and democracy, Guatemalan youth are routinely criminalized, feared, and excluded from civic spaces. Comprising a multi-sited ethnography, Bellino documents the ways that adolescents at four schools, embedded in urban and rural communities, learn about and make meaning of their country's history of authoritarianism, while developing their civic identities within a struggling democracy. Through rich ethnographic accounts, she traces youth experiences from schools to their homes and communities in order to understand how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice travel--often contentiously--across public and private spaces, as well as between generations. In doing so, we see how young people respond to educational silences and the rare opportunities to critically examine injustice, while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. Youth draw on histories of ethnic, class, and political marginalization in making everyday choices, as they decide whether to engage with, trust, question, or challenge fellow citizens and the institutional structures that organize their society. The book deepens our understanding of how postwar political processes and global discourses of peace, democracy, and transitional justice influence educational reform and everyday opportunities in and outside of schools to narrate, commemorate, and contest injustice. In a society still marked by legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised."--
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