A primavera nos dentes, a manhã desejada: ecos e ressonâncias das ocupações dos secundaristas no Brasil

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2016, high school students carried out one of the most insurgent political movements in recent times in Brazil: public school occupations. Motivated by several reasons, they were marked mainly by the unprecedented nature of student self-management, the discourse of refusal to join political parties, and the challenge imposed on public authorities. Part of a decade of political turmoil on the national scene (triggered by the demonstrations of June 2013), the occupations began in São Paulo. Then they spread to several other states, most notably Rio de Janeiro and Paraná. The visibility of the movement, initially located in alternative media, gained strong repercussions in mainstream media, provoking public opinion and narrative disputes about it. This thesis analyzes the movement based on reflections on experience proposed by Spanish educator Jorge Larrosa. Taking experience as a guiding principle, the thesis revolves around several questions about the occupations: what was left behind, who was left behind, and how it was left behind, bringing these effects and affects closer to the echoes and resonances ideas. Based on this proposal,occupations are conceived as a multilayered experience, constituted by and constitutes the lives of the people affected by them: students, teachers, activists, artists, and the researcher herself. Furthermore, given the space the movement has gained within and outside of academia, it is possible to examine it in dialogue with society.Thus, it was divided into different perspectives: reflections on politics in its formal understanding (collective movements, parties and elections) and also the political aspects ofsocial networks’ influence, the use of space and the relationship with time in capitalist society, including the deep connections with aesthetics, subjectivity, art and life. The analysis has cultural studies as its investigative orientation and is supported by interdisciplinary theoretical references, participant observation, interviews, audiovisual recordings, performing arts and the media in general (newspapers, magazines, social networks). The space-time frame of the research is situated between an occupation observed by the author in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, expressed in the dissertation that precedes this thesis (COSTA, 2017), and broadens the view of occupations as an extensive and plural movement with affinities and differences observed especially in the occupations of São Paulo and Paraná. The narrative flow used in the text proposes theoretical and analytical debates following the tone of a conversation with the intention of inviting the largest possible number of interlocutors, ranging from readers accustomed to academic texts from higher education to a high school student. This choice meets the desire and commitment to accessibility of the discussion to a broad audience. This thesis rejects the label of result, in the productivist sense of the term. Its contribution, in line with other research on the subject, is to point out some perceptions of effects and affects, presenting material and subjective implications of different intensities. It concludes that the impossibility of capturing the movement, due to its singularity, is precisely its condition of continuity as an experience: echoes and resonances still ongoing.