EDUCATION, FETISHISM AND UTOPIA: Paulo Freire's antifetishist perspectives in the context of the socio-climatic crisis.

• Grant number: 24/19291-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: February 05, 2025
• End date: July 04, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Allan da Silva Coelho
• Grantee: Allan da Silva Coelho
• Host Investigator: Michael Lowy
• Host Institution: Universidade São Francisco (USF). Campus Itatiba. Itatiba , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: École Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales, France

Abstract

Paulo Freire's work seems to be one of the most exciting historical concretizations of the famous allegory of Walter Benjamin's Thesis I in "On the Concept of History" (1940) on the relationship between historical materialism and theology. If we highlight the book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" as a relevant expression of the social worldview of "liberation Christianity", we would have a pedagogy derived from the praxis of liberation with a series of thematic elements and representations constitutive of an anti-fetishist anti-capitalism. In the context of the social and environmental crisis that challenges humanity, we propose to understand in this key reading the aspects of fetishism present in the processes that teach a certain "way of being" in consumer society. The critique of consumer society articulates aspects of the theory of fetishism as the foundation of utopian projects, from the field of studying capitalism as religion. Each utopia presupposes a conception of ethics, anthropology and a formative proposal for the human being. The more general question guiding this investigation is how an anti-fetishist education has the potential to generate utopias as alternative horizons of plausibility from the conflict between the rational understanding of the socio-climatic crisis and the subjective configurations of the ways of being human under neoliberal logic. Its organizing categories are the idea of the normality of life, the model of desire, the consciousnesses of justification and the processes of guilt/meritocracy. Based on dialectic-comprehension, it sets out to understand, by comparing the social worldview of different actors in the discussions on social and environmental justice, which categories make it possible to identify critical elements of fetishism based on the idea of a pedagogical itinerary proposed in Laudato Sí (Pope Francis) as one of the main references in the defense of social and environmental justice, associated with Paulo Freire's theoretical construction in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed".