Complexities, responsibilities and inventions: construction of subjectivities and rights in the encounter between institutions and young people from popular sectors

Abstract

In this article we present the results of a social research that analyzes the relationship between young people from popular sectors and institutions that work in the access and in the exercise of rights. For the data construction, we have developed a qualitative methodological strategy, carrying out semi-structured interviews, participant and nonparticipant observations with young people and referents in six institutions and social organizations of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The matter of rights is a construction field, a visualization of the future, which also implies adapting permanently to new tensions in institutional practices and limits, according to singularized ways of relating to young people. In the institutional experiences that we analyze coexist: the worry of making up “different” organizations; the work strategies stressed from good wills and responsibilities of their agents; the complexities to adapt and, at the same time, the transformation of the juvenile subjectivities. Relations of recognition, tenderness, commitment, trust, that transform the individual and collective identities, coexist with a variety of difficulties of different order in the institutional daily.