The Youth Turn: Youth Movements and the Struggle for Higher Education in Brazil

• In Event: Youth resistance and alternative youth livelihoods

Proposal

In the 2013 protests that swept Brazil, cuts in education spending figured into multiple other issues including increases in bus fares and related forms of precarity, inequality, and neoliberal capitalism. Several months after Bolsonaro entered office, grievances against cuts in education spending once again reverberated, this time louder and as front and center of street protests. Chants insisted “education is not a commodity” alongside banners stating, “our weapon is education!” Given Bolsonaro’s swift attacks on public universities in particular it is not surprising that higher education struggles figured prominently on the streets throughout 2019. Threats to higher education invoke broader explanations about the political life of youth and the state structures that govern them. Drawing from preliminary ethnographic research, this presentation discusses youth movements, focusing on the ways in which youth frame and ‘articulate’ (Hall 1996) anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and feminism alongside the fight for access to higher education. Youth activate educational strategies to achieve their goals such as through mobilizing public classes (aulas públicas) during protests, college preparation courses, public hearing speeches, and other forms of in person and digital knowledge production and pedagogies. The presentation invites discussion about youth identities within what I refer to as a “youth turn” in Brazil and within a broader transnational landscape of youth movements.

Author

• Alice Taylor, University of California, Berkeley