Reimagining Education and Collective Politics: Looking to Brazilian Youth Movements

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Collective Politics and Social Contexts of Education

Abstract

This paper examines how Brazilian youth movements center education as they articulate plural anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, and ecosocialist struggles. It draws from a multi-sited ethnography of youth movements in Brazil, 70 in-depth interviews, and social media analysis. From the streets to Youtube classes, youth mobilize across a constellation of plural and intersectional identities and struggles. In doing so, they construct novel collective projects, such as by delineating the groups to which they belong and forging movement knowledge into political campaigns. Youth movements offer significant lessons for reimagining education systems that dismantle a neoliberal focus on the individual and massively inequitable structures. Youth activists recast what kinds of education matter, where it takes place and how it may be done collectively.

Author

• Alice Y Taylor, University of California - Berkeley