The Seminar on Youth Research. An experience on articulation

What do we know about young people? This question has allowed UNAM’s Seminar on Youth Research (SIJ, from its Spanish name) to approach to a series of answers for sketching actions and organizing the different working areas that form our everyday tasks. These answers are organized in four pillars: studies and research; dissemination and publications; teaching; and networking, both inside Mexico and through Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

The Seminar was created in 2008 by an Agreement of UNAM’s Presidency. Throughout these fourteen years, the Seminar has become a conducive space for the articulation of knowledge about youth and young people, with different and diverse stakeholders which not only proceed from the academic world, but also establishe relevant connections with civil and social organizations, governments, and officials in the Legislative and Judicial powers. These society-linked actions give sense to our work and allow us to contribute to define, follow, and evaluate public policies, as well as to form and train human resources with a renewed vision on the implications of working with and for young people.

Following its objectives, the SIJ has been able to shape a wide educational offer, both for training and for establishing dialogue. Since the beginning, formation and training in the SIJ have been designed as long-distance education program, taking advantage of the still incipient tools offered by technology those days, in order to structure an online pedagogic approach, with permanently available tutors and guides, so that alumni can dedicate the suggested weekly time, according to their needs and possibilities. This was a pioneering approach from more than a decade ago; today it is even more than real as it articulates with digital tools everywhere. Our primary educational offer consists of:

• Diploma in Youth Worlds. One of the longest programs of the SIJ; it registers twelve yearly editions and has accredited more than 200 alumni.
• Diploma in School and Youth. In association with the Secretary of Public Education from Mexico, it records two editions with more than 200 schoolteachers as alumni.
• Diploma in Management and Youth Public Policies. In association with the Mexican Institute for Youth, six calls have been launched, with one of them in the international level, thanks to the intervention of the International Organism for Latin American and the Iberian Peninsula Youth. More than 300 people as regular alumni (including officials form different governmental levels, people from the civil society, legislators, and academics).

Each of these diplomas was accredited through UNAM’s Regional Center of Multidisciplinary Research, confirming their quality, and guaranteeing curricular value for the students.

As for dialogues and the construction of learning communities, the SIJ has developed two strategies:

• The National Network of Young Researchers which promotes that young postgraduate students from anywhere in Mexico, can find a space for debate, interchange, and encounter, so that formation and specialization in the area of youth studies can be strengthened.
• Dialogue Seminars. For five years, we have been holding monthly meetings for interchange and updating debates and analysis on youth in Mexico and Latin America. These are open seminars in which specialists are invited to share their research advances and results.

Both experiences have produced lessons and challenges that the SIJ uses to consolidate another pedagogic trend: short courses that engage with new themes and working methodologies. The best part of these short courses is that they are addressed to a non-specialized audience.

We have also noticed that—except for some initiatives in Spain, Colombia, and Argentina— there are no educational spaces designed to cope with the challenges posed by youths today: challenges that can only be addressed in a critical, situated, and transdisciplinary way.

Despite the richness and potentiality of some very long and very demanding formative experiences, none of them seems to be trying to answer the main problems that youth face today. There lies in the need of a space for dialogue and knowledge that can be attended in a short term, and in which not only national and regional, as well as thematic differences can be addressed, but where new diverse approaches and themes can also find a place to develop, with the participation of specialists from different parts of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

Because of these reasons, we believe that the short courses strategy allows us to take advantage of the SIJ’s accumulated experience, and at the same time, of the growing demand for spaces that allow reflection through transdisciplinarity, sociocultural localization, and youth realities comparative analysis. The SIJ’s tradition trend is to serve graduate and postgraduate students, but we also receive independent students interested in the themes addressed by the courses. This has had an impact in the network articulated by the SIJ itself, in which different people participate: specialists from different places and academic origins, as well as people who are just interested in the themes of the courses.

With this proposal, we seek to generate an educational program that allows the debate on the latest advances in knowledge production (theoretical frameworks and methodological structures) and the exchange of realities and public interventions experienced by youths in the different sociocultural contexts of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

In this mood we have dedicated short courses to cinema, music, digital methodologies, public budgets, gender and feminism, public policies, and others. Our faculty staff participate and interact, connected in synchronic sessions form different universities, organizations and foundations in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, among other countries.

We want to highlight the area of formation of specialists; an effort that aims to produce conditions for the better understanding of youths through research and through enhanced listening and accompanying abilities by the public management of youth matters. This means that in the SIJ we consider as a fundamental task, the promotion of a complete structural renewal of educational programs for social scientists and public administration professionals who work intellectually, technically, and also emotionally for and with young people.

The SIJ promotes sociocultural formation on the “young condition” with researchers that conduct innovative studies. We also want to form public and social organisms’ managing staff, able to start interventions with better possibilities of success, based in accompanying youngsters’ groups and organizations, and in mutually listening to each other so that we can build better conceptual, methodological, and empirical structures.

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