The Promise of Recognition and the Repercussions of Government Intervention: The Transpedagogical Vision of Popular Educators in Buenos Aires, Argentina

• In Event: 25.067 - Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: 25.067-19 - Challenging Power and Transforming Relationships Through Grassroots Organizing

Abstract

This investigation draws from Mouffe’s work on the politics of public togetherness to show how popular education and social change movements in Buenos Aires conceive of partnership building among educators, students, and communities under the impediment of neoliberalism. It provides an empirical account of popular educators who together built the first and only school in Latin America to offer education opportunities for transgender men and women, how they secured government recognition, but eventually lost their power within it. In making the shift from a popular school, to one in partnership with Argentina’s Ministry of Education, these educators were forced to drop the more radical aspects of their work in favor of a pedagogy aligned with patriarchal, neoliberalist sanctioned reform.

Author

• Jennifer Lee O'Donnell, University of Massachusetts - Amherst