Political Children

"Political Children argues for new methods of listening to marginalized young people so as to better understand everyday practices of state power and violence. Grounded in extensive interviews, longitudinal ethnography, historical analysis, and archival work, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland shows how two separate groups of working young people in Lima, Peru, have become political protagonists, resisting and critiquing inequality and injustice. She details the ways they interpret and address a range of issues affecting their lives--from environmental degradation to second-rate public facilities, gender-based violence to dangerous working conditions--and reveals how by organizing and fighting systemic marginalization they make sense of state violence, and of their own labor. By attending to the affect, longing, and desires that animate these young people's politics, Luttrell-Rowland conveys the meaning of their lives and work in an economy that invokes their subjectivity and rights while rendering them non-participatory subjects. Though the lives of young people are often imagined as far from politics, these "political children" expose the contradictions of public policy narratives in which the Peruvian state is cast as a neutral site for engagement and action. Through their criticism and activism, the young people in this book demonstrate that such narratives divorce state power from the very places in which it is experienced as structural violence"--