Molly Hamm-Rodríguez is an anthropologist of education, using linguistic, ethnographic, and participatory methods to understand and advocate for educational equity among multilingual youth in the Caribbean and the United States. Her most recent work focuses on the intersections of tourism, political economy, language, and youth futures in the Dominican Republic, and was funded by Fulbright DDRA, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and NAEd/Spencer Fellowships. Her research has been published in Applied Linguistics, archipelagos: A journal of Caribbean digital praxis, CENTRO: Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, Language Arts, TESOL Quarterly, and The Reading Teacher. She is an active member of the American Anthropological Association, Comparative and International Education Society, and the Caribbean Studies Association. She will be joining the USF College of Education as Assistant Professor of Social Foundations in Fall 2023.
Session Description
“Changing Policy Narratives and Practices for Youth Workforce Development in the Caribbean”
Globally, youth workforce development initiatives aim to support youth in developing the technical and soft skills necessary to become employable in locally productive labor markets (EDUCA & MEPyD, 2017; USAID, ChildTrends, FHI360, 2015). In the Caribbean, these initiatives are linked to strategies of crime and violence prevention led by international donors and to national development strategies focused on industry growth (Parra-Torrado, 2014; USAID, n.d.). These initiatives intersect with high levels of unemployment and widespread informality in the labor market (Maurizio, 2021) as well as lower levels of school completion rates at the secondary level (CEPAL, 2021), typically targeting “out of school, out of work” youth (de Hoyos et al., 2016). While project design is often focused on skill-building, these programs rarely include pedagogies of social transformation and may reproduce social inequalities by funneling marginalized youth into precarious labor. In this policy advocacy presentation, I draw on 12 years of experience working with youth development programs in the Dominican Republic to explore the affordances of shifting the focus of youth workforce development programs to address experiences of exploitation and harm that youth frequently experience on the job. Using frameworks from Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Community-Based Research (CBR), I share how education policymakers and program designers as well as classroom educators can more adequately fulfill the role of adult allies by working with institutional actors and youth themselves to combat structural issues that prevent youth from securing jobs or succeeding in their employment experiences.