Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Fifth Invasion of Guatemala

The purpose of this research was to explore how students learn about Buen Vivir as an indigenous alternative to concepts of development. Previously, I have worked in the community of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, where this research was conducted, as an educator on a youth participatory action research project for the past 10 years. In this research, I interviewed community elders to develop an understanding of a locally relevant concept of Buen Vivir, and examined how young people grappled with this concept in the context of a youth seminar. Preliminarily, we saw that young people understood buen vivir as the formation of subject-subject relations that challenge western concepts of development in key ways. These findings were pre-doctoral and will inform ongoing research examining how young people learn about and develop locally relevant, indigenous responses to climate change.