Reivindicar para permanecer...: Expresiones de ciudadanía de un grupo de jóvenes hip-hop de la ciudad de Bogotá

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the ways in which a group of hip-hop youths in Bogotá express their sense of citizenship and some of the ways in which they actively exercise this sense of citizenship. It reports part of the findings of the project, "Conceptions of citizenship in a group of schooled and non-schooled youth in Bogotá." The project was designed around multiple case studies, and pedagogical workshops were used to collect information. Discourse analysis, as proposed by T. van Dijk, was used to analyze the data. The results of the study indicate that this group envisions the exercise of citizenship as a series of aesthetic experiences with a clear political intention, oriented to the improvement of public, economic, and social conditions for the affirmation of hip-hop culture. In addition, the results indicate that these expressions are motivated by a moral sense, which prompts the group to denounce social injustice, and the lack of recognition of human dignity and the contributions that their group can make to the building of a more democratic, diverse, and inclusive society.