Cartas ao congresso nacional: expressões escritas da cidadania no processo constituinte de 1988

Abstract

The present doctoral research aims at discussing the written letters sent by several subjects containing ideas for the Constitution of Brazil enacted in 1988. The selected letters are all documents written by different subjects as part of a wide archive, which are nowadays part of the asset archives of the Museum of the Republic, evidencing that they had not finished primary school at that time and space of their writing. The research approaches the plurarity of knowledge which circulates socially, in particular the one rendered in young and adult subjects written expressions. This is to be understood as a process of political participation and its main premise can be so resumed: by writing letters to the elaboration of the Constitution, these subjects produced citizenship and exercised their political participation portraying themselves as citizens by written expression. Moreover, the approach and interpretation of the letters indicate that the subjects had some knowledge they might have not been aware of regardless of the so-called formal education to express other meanings of citizenship, to claim rights so often denied. The findings enabled the identification of social practices and the notion of cognitive justice outside formal education and revealed other types of knowledge necessary to exercise citizenship on the same conditions as educated subjects in formal settings. Our claim is that formal education is not a condition per se for the exercise of citizenship constituted by networks, framed in the subjects lives and inserted in their own different stories. On the contrary, these subjects proved to be politically recognized outside formal education, represented by their written expressions. Also, we tentatively claim a social practice wherein cognitive justice can be identified as people outside formal education could bear necessary knowledge to the exercise of citizenship since they recognized themselves at the same level as educated people.