Approaches to the field of child and youth care studies in Argentina

Abstract

This article reconstructs relevant characteristics of the field of child and youth care studies developed in Argentina and dialogues with contributions from the Latin American region. It recovers productions made in the last twenty years that, from different disciplinary fields of social sciences, feminist economics and gender studies, allow us to approach the current state of the discussions. In a context of pandemic/post-pandemic, it is essential to recover the social and political discussions produced around the issue, a context where questions about the sustainability of life and care have become central to the public agenda, and where the discourses and appeals to the rights of children and young people are incorporated by different actors and by the State at its different jurisdictional levels. Questions about care refer to social, community and family relations, interwoven in the heat of a series of disputes over the imposition of particular meanings and interests. Characterizing the relationships between the state, families, communities and markets and their various interventions is relevant in the search for a critical analysis of a familiarized and feminized social and political organization of care that accentuates the reproduction of inequalities.