Valeria Manzano

Valeria Manzano won an international Social Sciences Research Council Dissertation Fellowship to conduct research in Argentina in the 2006-2007 academic year.

Her goal is to explain how youth became a central cultural and political actor and a prominent discursive category in 1960s and 1970s Argentina. She believes that only a detailed analysis of the making of youth will make it possible to grasp the enduring cultural and political transformations that took place in those decades. Manzano will analyze the representations of youth that proliferated beginning in the late 1950s. Government educational and social welfare officials as well as sociologists and psychologists engaged in a dialogue about the threats and hopes of modernization as well as transformations in gender relationships and sexuality.

Manzano will also study the formation of youth cultures and political mobilization. She will examine both the experiences of students at the University of Buenos Aires and those of working class youths in Lanús, a neighborhood in the Greater Buenos Aires area. To analyze the formation of youth cultures, Manzano will investigate the offering and consumption of "youthful" cultural goods, the creation of spaces of sociability, and the changing conceptions and practices of sexuality. To investigate politicization, she will examine the creation of a political culture of contestation among working- and middle-class youths, showing how a general "anti-system" perspective developed and how a new set of political rituals and symbols emerged.