Seminar: Contested Imaginaries: Youth, Inequality, and Security in Argentina

Join us for a thought-provoking seminar with Professor Emilio Ayos, hosted by the Leeds Social Sciences Institute. Professor Ayos will share insights from his research, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how policy frameworks shape lived experiences. This event will bring together researchers interested in global societal justice and policy impact.

Abstract

A decline in living conditions and rising inequalities have become evident over the past decade in Argentina. Concurrently, public discourse has seen a strengthening of far-right ideologies, a key tenet of which is the conflation of dependency and dangerousness in the figure of marginalised youth. Yet this narrative is not uncontested: alternative perspectives challenge the imaginaries advanced by the new right. These tensions are reflected in state interventions. On one hand, province and local youth policies largely persist within a rights-based framework, with some advances toward intersectional approaches to inequality (incorporating gender, race, and disability). On the other hand, this contrasts with proposals such as lowering the criminal responsibility age and restrictive immigration reforms pushed by the national government. Public debate exhibits a similar duality: while conservative, punitive narratives have gained traction, they face sustained opposition. Regarding security and youth, two competing frameworks emerge: a politically nuanced construction, framing crime and violence within broader critiques of social disintegration or "anomie". While the other relies on fragmentary snapshots drawn from everyday experiences of street crime and diagnoses of escalating violence. The youth thus occupy an ambivalent position—oscillating between victim and perpetrator—within cultural-political productions that alternately align with and resist hegemonic security discourses.

About Professor Ayos:

Emilio Ayos is a Professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a Researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). He serves as Deputy Director of the Gino Germani Research Institute (UBA), where he leads the Comparative Research Program and participates in the Security Observatory. His research specializes in the intersections between crime control and social policy, examining the discursive construction of insecurity as a public issue, youth studies, violence, and the development of preventive policies. He has taught in graduate programs on security and social policy and is the author of the book Crime and Poverty: Intersections Between Social Policy and Criminal Justice (Delito y Pobreza: espacios de intersección entre los campos de la política social y la política criminal). His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals in his field, both nationally and internationally. He is involved in several international research projects, including A New Measure of Socioeconomic Inequalities for International Comparison (INCASI2 – Horizon Europe) and The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism (MIGMOBS – European Research Council). Additionally, he is part of the International Advisory Board (IAB) for the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre (University of Leeds and University of York, UK).

Please contact LSSI@leeds.ac.uk if you have any queries or would like to make us aware of any accessibility accommodations you may require.