Between illicit economies and having a dream: Exploring rural youth aspirations and life-courses in a rural municipality in Colombia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rural youth's aspirations and life-courses are shaped by complex interplays of external (social, economic, historical) and internal (agency-driven) factors. In rural Colombia, characterized by illicit economic pressures and a legacy of armed conflict, structural realities may constrain youth's ability to achieve transformative life trajectories. This study investigates how these influence youths' life-course decision making-in a remote village. The Possible Selves and intersectionality theories guided the study by addressing overlapping social identities and power structures that shape youth's lived experiences. Employing a participatory photovoice initiative, participants led data interpretation and thematic analysis; five themes emerged: youth, ecosystem, entrepreneurism, agriculture and livestock production, and effort and joy. Findings illustrate a tension between youth aspirations—characterized by hopes for stability, education, and community engagement—and the structural constraints imposed by marginalizing economic systems and a history of internal conflict. Neoliberal and illicit economic frameworks, coupled with conflict legacies, undermine rural youth agency and curtail opportunities for meaningful participation. Under these conditions, aspirations tend toward survival oriented -goals rather than transformative social change, perpetuating cycles of poverty and exclusion. To foster rural youth's aspirations, interventions must strengthen agency through improved access to quality education and inclusive participation in decision-making- processes. • Rural youth navigate aspirations amid conflict and dual licit/illicit economies. • Photovoice reveals agency and constraints shaping youth life-courses in rural Colombia. • Highlights how structural factors limit rural youth participation and opportunities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".