Professor Jennifer Goett Publishes Article on Youth Activism and Nicaragua's 2018 Insurrection

February 19, 2021

Professor Jennifer Goett recently published an article on youth activism in Nicaragua in The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. The article titled "¡Matria libre y vivir!: Youth Activism and Nicaragua's 2018 Insurrection" examines how youth subjectivity shaped Nicaragua's 2018 civic insurrection. 

 

A generation born after the end of the Sandinista Revolution in 1990 led the uprising, with the support of a broad sector of society. Once cast as apolitical and self‐involved, young protestors built insurgent spaces of democratic participation that challenged national political culture and the authoritarian social relations that it produces. Focusing on the university student movement, the authors examine how youth life and youth death at the hands of the state became powerful symbols of resistance. Some activists, particularly young women, even reimagined the nation as a space of self‐ and mutual care rooted in feminist, ecological, and decolonial consciousness. This ethic of life critiques the heroic martyrdom of the revolutionary past and the militarism, extractivism, and heteropatriarchy of the contemporary state.