Colombian born and educated in Europe, Dr. Diana García shares her thoughts about her experiences being a woman in different contexts and how these have shaped her work with youth communities in urban and rural areas in her home country. She discusses how youth have been excluded from the Colombian sociopolitical conversations at local and larger levels. She questions her own privilege and positionality as she reflects on what she can do to support marginalized communities to challenge corruption and inequality. She asks how the national identity is constructed and what citizenship means for young students and how they can be empowered to fight essentialist views of what it means to e Colombian. We finished our discussion by questioning the role of elite private schools and organizations to help Colombia build a prosperous future for all. Biography: Diana C. García Gómez is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Childhood Studies Department at Rutgers University—Camden. Drawing from the fields of childhood studies, memory studies, and employing qualitative and ethnographic methods, Diana’s research focuses on children’s and youth’s political participation in peacebuilding, collective memory, and social movements in post-accord Colombia. Her dissertation - Cultivating Hope - centers children’s and youth’s participation in transitional contexts by examining their engagement with collective memory processes in urban and rural settings. Diana holds a BA in Political Science from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and a MA in Cognition and Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Diana has also written on children’s representation by the Colombia’s truth commission’s social media in “’I have the right’: examining the role of children in the #DimeLaVerdad campaign” (forthcoming). Cite this podcast (APA): Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 17). CES5E7 –Youth as peacebuilders. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e7-youth-as-peacebuilders * Sources: García Gómez, D. C. (2018). The Perfect Computer? Children’s Experiences with ICT in Rural Colombia. In A. Mandrona & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods (pp. 218–232). Rutgers University Press.