"Becoming empowered”: Youth, education, and the politics of aspiration within three grassroots NGOs in Honduras

Abstract (English)

This paper examines how three youth-centered civil society spaces in Honduras – run by grassroots NGOs – use critical pedagogy, feminist education, and arts-based approaches to build marginalized young people’s “capacities to aspire” (Appadurai 2004) and to create spaces for these young people to act as protagonists in challenging dominant power structures. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I “research-worked” (O’Neill 2023) within these organizations, and over a decade of ongoing engagement in education and youth work in Honduras, I explore how these community-based initiatives act as “third spaces” of learning and resistance, challenging traditional educational structures and contesting top-down power relationships in both education and in the development sector. Through young people’s life stories and shared practice, I show how these spaces cultivate young peoples’ abilities to “read the world” (Freire 1985) and to both imagine and build alternative futures as individuals and as a collective. Through these life stories, I argue that education – in and outside of the classroom – becomes a site for struggle, transformation and liberation, where young people act as protagonists in challenging existing structures and building new ones.