When someone Talk Politics to Me, I am Reminded of the Romans: Chilean high school students’ frameworks for making political use of history

Abstract

This article examines how Chilean high school students who are involved in student protests demonstrate and make use of their understandings of politics and history, in order to inform and orient their own political actions. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in a Chilean public high school, I use discourse analysis to examine students’ interviews as a particular kind of social work. In these interviews, I argue that students were displaying and participating in the constant production of coherent frameworks in which history and politics are connected. Students’ understandings of history and politics inform and affect each other, as well as become significant in their citizenship education.