Youths and Inequalities: Persistent and Emerging Trends, and Public Policies, in the Time of the Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a generalized crisis that acts as a visibility of the preexisting social dynamics. That is to say, the pandemic occurs and spreads in a world with certain social dynamics and logic that is evidenced, accelerated, amplified, and deepened. In this chapter we will focus on the dynamics of production and reproduction of social inequalities from a generational point of view. Thus, we will analyze multidimensional social inequalities approached from an intersectional analysis that includes generational and territorial dimensions, crossed with others such as gender, labor, and education. We propose to address the situation of youth in the main cities of Latin America, taking some of the qualitative and quantitative works available. We will take the generational approach as an interpretative approach to the processes of production and reproduction of inequalities, following what has been proposed in previous works. From the experiences analyzed, we will seek to identify regional trends to unravel the dynamics of persistence and emergence of generational inequalities territorially configured in times of pandemic, as well as to identify the experiences of youth resistance and public policies that were implemented at this juncture.