Living Laboratory: Youth Narratives for Peacebuilding, Citizenship, and Community Resilience from a Decolonial Perspective

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the research process known as the Youth Living Laboratory, which, since 2023, has focused on the co-creation of spaces for reflection, collaborative design, and implementation of ideas for innovation and social research. Its focus is on the management of socially relevant knowledge in the areas of peacebuilding, community resilience, and citizenship, in Santander de Quilichao, Cauca department, and its contributions to decolonial and intercultural social work, situated within the scope of youth narratives, based on the management of living memory processes, promoting the intersectional fabric of diversity, and configuring new social forms of inhabiting one’s own territory. In this sense, the results of the problematization of processes of innovation, impact, and social research from the narratives, memories, and intercultural fabrics of young people belonging to the Lab. in a decolonial light will be shared. From this perspective, the laboratory was established as a space for co-construction of ethical-political knowledge, in which youth exercised their epistemic agency by narrating and reinterpreting their realities, articulating community, intercultural and decolonial knowledge that challenges the colonial logic of hegemonic knowledge (Albán Achinte, 2013; Walsh, 2009).