WagenerLaura

My name is Laura Wagener and I am a Biology Major with a Sociology Minor at Drake University. This semester, I am working with my Youth Studies Class to explore and expand/make a Wikipedia page of our own. Our Wikipedia Page can be found here: Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Drake University/Global Youth Studies (Fall 2015).

Project Proposal

For my Global Youth Studies article project, the topic I chose was the Youth in the Dominican Republic. I chose this topic because I spent four months in Santo Domingo earlier this year, and I would love to do more research on the youth culture there. There is no existing article on this, so I will be creating this page throughout the rest of the semester. Although I spent my time in the capital city of the country, I would like to further explore other areas of the country, including youth in rural areas and how their location affects their growth and development intellectually. I would also like to explore how the recent hurricane in Haiti impacted the lives of those living in the Dominican Republic, as immigration laws have gotten more strict since the natural disaster. Among these topics, I hope to look into labor and profession as well.

For my lead paragraph, I plan on incorporating all pieces of my articles into a broad summary. This will give the reader an idea of what the article is about along with some background on the country. I will start out with demographics of the Dominican Republic, specifically the youth population. Then I would like to give some background on the government of the country. It started out as a strict Dictatorship and has since transitioned into a Democracy. After this, I would like to talk about education and how many children have access to education, especially when looking at the undeveloped areas of the country. From there, I will attempt to look at the employment statistics for youth, and possibly even the overall rate of poverty in families. As a biology major, I would like to end the article talking about their healthcare and diseases commonly seen in youth.

As far as sources go, I have found multiple articles about the health care in the Dominican Republic, specifically on diseases such as HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Seeing as there are many sources on this topic, I intend on exploring this area more than I was originally planned. There was also an interesting article about suicide in Dominican youth, talking about the causes and stress seen among the age group, which I thought was also very interesting. Articles on the government also exist; talking about how the end of Rafael Trujillo's rein changed the country tremendously, both in labor markets and ideologies as a whole. In the next week or so, I will be looking for more education articles. I would love to compare the role of education in rural areas versus urban areas, and how families view education in general. If these topics become too much, I will narrow the search down to around three areas, and explore those as much as possible.

Sources

I will be using this source to look at the overview of the society in the Dominican Republic. In this book, multiple general things are discussed such as the demography, religion, ethnicity, language, quality of life, and human development. This will give me some insight on why the youth behave the way they do.

This article discusses the institutional reforms that have been made during the last two decades have markedly affected the functioning of the labor market and the youth sector. This paper aims to provide evidence of current levels of labor market involving the group between 15 and 29 years of age. Then, recommendations are made because for the majority of Latin American countries, there is a high youth population which can be challenging for the participation in the labor market.

This book is a narrative ethnography of the lives of street children and youth living in the capital city of the Dominican Republic. It talks about the non-governmental organizations that provide social services for these individuals. The author follows the intersecting lives of children, the institutions they come into contact with, and the relationships they have with each other, their families, and organization workers.

In this article, the author discusses how difficult it is when it comes to education in the Dominican Republic. Multiple Haitian families illegally immigrate to the Dominican Republic every year, and the Dominican government has perpetuated discriminatory laws against Dominico-Haitian children in a manner that prevents their enrollment in education beyond the fourth grade. Through this, the Dominican Republic violates their fundamental right to education, which could be their way out of marginalization and poverty.

I will be looking at this paper to explore the mobility, circulation, and identity formation among the street youth in Santo Domingo. This mobility is related to their circulation through various private and state-sponsored child protection agencies. While juvenile justice institutions are concerned with guaranteeing child protecting and rights, street children really struggle to maintain their autonomy. This, I'm sure, will tie to source number three.

Because I am interested in looking at the education and its challenges in the Dominican Republic, this study analyzes the challenges the country faces to increase educational levels, particularly of the poor, making the case that the education system is simultaneously an overachiever in education enrollment, and also an underperformer in attainments. This is because of high repetition rates. The Dominican Republic's main challenge is to understand and also address the causes of repetition and the weak progression. I would like to compare these aspects in the rural and urban areas of the country, and look at the similarities and differences.

Training for Students complete!