Banca de DEFESA: LUCILA DIDIER

I PREFER A HUG BEFORE A LIKE: 
HOW ARE YOUTHFUL SUBJECTIVITIES CONSTRUCTED IN RELATION TO THE TECHNICAL?

Educational technology.Youths. Digital Appropriation. ProA School. High School.

Digital technologies have achieved a relevant presence in today's societies, within which they are experienced as natural environments, where the technical and the social are mixed and interconfigured. In this context, the youth build their identities and subjectivities, framed in living the technique as a natural present, almost invisible. However, with the rise of technology, problems also appear, and others are reinforced, such as the growing digital gaps and the predominance of reductionist discourses to explain the relationship people/machines, especially in relation to young people. Within this framework, this thesis set out to analyze the relationships between technologies, subjectivities and youth in today's society, starting from knowing how technological experiences and the processes of digital appropriation of young people from an experimental secondary school, Escuela ProA, in Cordoba, Argentina. To account for the objective, an articulation between the theories of social constructivism, post-phenomenology and studies on digital appropriation was proposed; At the same time, we worked on the main discussions around the debate between adolescence and youth, taking a position on the latter. A qualitative thesis was carried out, with a social phenomenological approach, in which different data collection techniques were mixed (questionnaire, autobiographical accounts and interviews) in order to cover the phenomena from a global perspective, having the experience of the subjects as the axis of analysis. The data analysis was done through the content analysis technique that allowed the construction of categories emerging from the empirical field and subsequently placed in dialogue with the theoretical framework. Through the investigation, it was found that technologies are present in the lives of young people before material access occurs, co-constructing youth subjectivities. Even so, young people not only recognize the breaks in their daily practices before and after technology, but have also developed a critical and reflective view of the presence of technology in the world. The foregoing reflects that a process of digital appropriation was developed at a high level, which could be enhanced by the experience of being students of ProA, a school that seeks to trace a transversal experience with technologies. The young people in this thesis are not only involved with technologies a great deal of the time, but they are also capable of recognizing their impact on the world, demonstrating a high degree of awareness of technology.