Popular education and the spoliation of memory: Brazil and Chile in the neoliberal mirror

• Grant number: 21/03013-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2022
• End date: September 15, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education
• Principal Investigator: Carolina de Roig Catini
• Grantee: Ian Gabriel Couto Schlindwein
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/06694-6 - Chilean popular education at the end of the century: memories and stories of the democratic transition in the 1990s, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impacts of the neoliberal hegemonic policies of the 1990s on the memory of counter-hegemonic struggles connected to social movements and revolutionary processes based on popular education practices incorporated by an emancipatory meaning, which has been developing through the last decades in different parts of Latin America. The objective is not only to identify and analyze the presence of remembrance in such processes, but also the forms of conversion and assimilation of the struggles and practices of popular education through neoliberal management devices. Therefore, the methodology will be based on a comparative study between two paradigmatic cases within the South American context: the Brazilian and the Chilean, through an examination of the bibliography together with interviews with militants from these movements in both countries. While the genesis of neoliberalism in Brazil took place in the "redemocratization" period, especially in the last decade of the 20th century, Chile is seen as a laboratory for neoliberalism, where experiments to renew liberalism developed in association with the authoritarian state during the Pinochet dictatorship. The critical examination of the forms of spoliation of memory is a key to understanding the place of popular education in a decade of crucial transformations, with legacies inherited from dictatorships and democracies.