Description
Book SynopsisMelissa Brough explores how youth-centered forms of civic and cultural engagement in Medellín, Colombia, create networks of change that have the possibility to transform and democratize cities around the world.
Trade Review“In few world cities do creative vision and the long shadow of brutal institutionalized violence intersect more powerfully than in Medellín, Colombia. What would it mean to respond to that city's challenges using ‘participation’ as the guiding principle? Melissa Brough's rich and clear-sighted study of local participation within citizens' media, participatory budgeting, hip-hop collectives, and urban policy making is a major advance in our understanding of Latin America's distinctive path back towards democracy.” -- Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics
“[
Youth Power in Precarious Times] presents an interesting case study mostly unknown by the academia outside the Global South, providing a significant contribution to the debate around participation, youth, and marginalized populations, while combining a variety of academic fields. . . . One of the book’s obvious merits lies in its resistance to binary thinking by proposing a conceptual frame that provides alternative readings about a socially complex reality.” -- José Alberto Simões * International Journal of Communication *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. From Participation to Polycultural Civics 16
2. Digitizing the Tools of Engagement 59
3. "We Think about the City Differently" 99
4. "Medellín, Governable and Participatory 145
5. Polycultural Civics in the Digital Age 189
Notes 234
Bibliography 276
Index 312