Prefigurative Brazilian ativismo through the lens of the transformative activist stance

Renewing radical political imagination through “collectividual” agency

Bibliographic Data

ID18979231
AuthorsA L L D F Sales (0000-0001-8607-7532, UNESP, corresponding author), Eduardo Vianna (0000-0002-0693-1346, LaGuardia Community College and The Graduate Center- CUNY), Flávio Fernandes Fontes (0000-0003-2036-8147, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte), Silvio Yasui (0000-0001-5015-6634, UNESP)
Year2020
Volume27
Issue3
Pages277-291
Publication date2020-07-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMind Culture and Activity (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1074-9039 • E-ISSN: 1532-7884
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10749039.2020.1740935
OpenAlexW3013873123
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited25

During three months in 2015, in São Paulo, Brazil, public high school students carried out an unprecedentedly successful protest that forced the state governor to abandon plans to merge schools, which would have resulted in overcrowding and reducing their number. Working collectively via social media coordination without direct ties to institutions, students occupied hundreds of schools, reflecting recent trends in social movements characterized as prefigurative practices. The sociological literature has grappled with theorizing the core dimensions of prefigurative politics that have been associated with widely varied and often politically contested practices. We argue that defining prefigurative practices calls for theorizing agency and human development as integral to collaborative projects of social transformation and that Vygotsky’s project expanded by the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS) approach proposed by Anna Stetsenko can contribute to such theorizing. The TAS offers conceptual tools to analyze the dialectics of individual and collective agency in struggles for a sought-after future implicated in transformative practice. Based on a case study of high school occupations, we highlight the central role played by students’ development as agents of social transformation in conjunction with the growth of their collective political action as key to creating the future in the present

Dialectic · Epistemology · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Social change · Social movement · Social science · Social transformation · Sociology · Transformative learning · Innovative Education and Learning Practices · Law

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access