Juvenicide: Reframing the youth violence debate
According to the WHO (2023), youth aged 15-29 represent 37% of global homicide victims. Despite this staggering statistic, young people are still predominantly framed as perpetrators rather than victims of lethal violence. My latest project seeks to reframe this skewed debate by de-centering ‘youth violence’ as a social problem and shifting attention to ‘violence against youth’ as a social emergency. Paralleling the theoretical and legal conceptualisation of femicide, and building on emerging literature on the concept of juvenicidio in Latin America, this project asks: is violence against youth a global phenomenon? Is there anything specific about youth as a social category that makes young people particularly vulnerable to violence? And would it make sense to name these killings juvenicides rather than homicides? Through initial seed funding awarded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Independent Social Research Foundation, this project brings together scholars from Latin America and Europe to advance in the legal and quantitative applications of the concept. In the longer-term, I aim to secure funding to develop the first cross-cultural ethnographic study of juvenicide at global level.
Informal settlements, migration and organized crime
My ongoing project (2023-2025), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted at the Geneva Graduate Institute, ethnographically explores the housing experiences of Venezuelan migrants who live in one of the largest informal urban settlements of Latin America, located in Medellín, Colombia. It explores the housing markets that migrants have access to in order to secure a place to live in this area, examining the emerging roles that criminal gangs play in housing market regulation , as well as the detrimental impact of state-led evictions and demolitions. As part of its action component, the project includes a funding campaign developed in collaboration with local stakeholders aimed at financing the construction of a a school and community centre.
Youth engagement in narco-gangs
During my doctoral research (2014-2019) at the University of Oxford, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, I ethnographically explored the lives of a group of adolescents implicated at the low-ends of criminal narco-gangs in and around Medellín, Colombia. My research shows that modern Colombian gangs are nothing like the the old-days, family-like protective groups. Rather, they are governed by an exploitative economy whereby low-level adolescents take all of the risk and enjoy none of the gains. I argue that adolescents working at the low-level of these modern gangs live in a condition of 'augmented precarity’, characterised by the compounded precarization of both their labor and their life.
Youth-led activism at the urban margins
Between January and April 2019 I conducted a visual ethnography project on the lives of young people who seek to build urban peace in marginal Medellín neighbourhoods. The project, funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund and hosted at the University of Oxford, sought to investigate how some youth manage to develop alternatives to criminal engagement, and to showcase their demands for social justice. The project employed a series of creative audiovisual techniques, and resulted in five participatory films co-produced with young people on the ground, which were then used by them as advocacy tools.