Ensamblajes sociomateriales y participación juvenil rural en un Centro Educativo para la Producción Total de la provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina1

Abstract

This article examines rural youth participation in a Center for Total Production Education (CEPT) in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, from the perspective of new materialisms. Its objective is to understand how sociomaterial assemblages shape participatory practices among rural youth within the school context. The research adopted a collaborative ethnographic approach based on the sociolinguistic analysis of Student Council meetings, complemented by field notes and photographic records. Through a narrative-analytical sequence, the study reconstructs the emergence of an assemblage around the proposal to build coat racks, identifying the articulation of human and non-human actors, institutional regulations, material objects, needs, expectations, and shared representations that generate new meanings of youth participation. The findings show that participatory practices emerge through dynamic relationships among these heterogeneous elements, fostering processes of youth self-organization while simultaneously generating tensions with institutional regulations. The analysis also demonstrates that interactions among young people, adults, and material actants both promote and constrain collective participation. The study concludes that a new materialist perspective combined with sociolinguistic analysis provides a valuable analytical framework for understanding rural youth participation by incorporating the relationships among people, materiality, and educational contexts.