The Social Life of Teen Attention: Navigating Citizenship, Schooling and the World Wide Web in Cochabamba, Bolivia and Warsaw, Poland
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis is an anthropological treatise on teenage attention based on ethnographic fieldwork at two urban schools in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Warsaw, Poland. It proposes a socio-cognitive framework for an analysis of attention as a nexus comprised of ideological, bureaucratic, somatic, and affective elements as well as a form of practice that acts upon the world. I argue that youth are attentional agents capable of modifying their environment through attentional practice, which is, nevertheless structured by factors within the attentional nexus. I further argue that attentional practice has an intrinsically political character. The first section of this thesis considers the historical and institutional setting of my fieldsites and the import of combining psychological and anthropological perspectives on cognition towards an understanding of social phenomena at the collective level. In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of the social attentionscape to speak of elements within a delineated society that come to the centre of collective attention and are likely to become part of political agendas, including educational policies. The social attentionscape is grounded in historically shaped value systems and world imaginaries endorsed by governments and civil society. In Bolivia, imaginaries of Western modernity and development have a strained coexistence with ideologies of decolonisation. In Poland, a nationalist and Catholic ideal of Polishness clashes with the urban ideal of liberal European citizenship. In Chapter 2, I consider how those imaginaries relate to quotidian practices at the school, guiding pedagogic orientations through the (re)production of teachers’ normative attention and interacting with on-the-stop attentional needs of exam bureaucracy in Warsaw and the local community in Cochabamba. The second section of the thesis examines three areas of alleged youth ‘disconnection’: political participation (Chapter 3), social media (Chapter 4), and the classroo…
abstract: This thesis is an anthropological treatise on teenage attention based on ethnographic fieldwork at two urban schools in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Warsaw, Poland. It proposes a socio-cognitive framework for an analysis of attention as a nexus comprised of ideological, bureaucratic, somatic, and affective elements as well as a form of practice that acts upon the world. I argue that youth are attentional agents capable of modifying their environment through attentional practice, which is, nevertheless structured by factors within the attentional nexus. I further argue that attentional practice has an intrinsically political character. The first section of this thesis considers the historical and institutional setting of my fieldsites and the import of combining psychological and anthropological perspectives on cognition towards an understanding of social phenomena at the collective level. In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of the social attentionscape to speak of elements within a delineated society that come to the centre of collective attention and are likely to become part of political agendas, including educational policies. The social attentionscape is grounded in historically shaped value systems and world imaginaries endorsed by governments and civil society. In Bolivia, imaginaries of Western modernity and development have a strained coexistence with ideologies of decolonisation. In Poland, a nationalist and Catholic ideal of Polishness clashes with the urban ideal of liberal European citizenship. In Chapter 2, I consider how those imaginaries relate to quotidian practices at the school, guiding pedagogic orientations through the (re)production of teachers’ normative attention and interacting with on-the-stop attentional needs of exam bureaucracy in Warsaw and the local community in Cochabamba. The second section of the thesis examines three areas of alleged youth ‘disconnection’: political participation (Chapter 3), social media (Chapter 4), and the classroo…
author: Buzanska, Katarzyna
language: eng
keywords: Adolescence, Attention, Bolivia, Poland, Politics, Schooling
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/871ec9a4-d5b5-42bc-9d27-23cb1cce889e/download
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
date published: 2024-05-17
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:32:57Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.113026