(Re)Framing a Problem: Militancy in Question

This article analyzes the recent wave of political protests in Brazil, highlighting student movement participation. We will raise four points. First all, this was not a single student movement, but a cycle of protest, consisting of many different actors, issues, and forms of demonstration. Second, protesters built what we call "hybrid performances", drawing on three repertoires of contention: socialist, autonomist and patriotic. Third, the protests presented a strong rejection of political parties and problematized the relationship between social movements, political parties, and institutional politics. Finally, we discuss the outcomes and consequences of these mobilization, especially the state responses to them.

Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2020

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. Beginning in June 2013, a wave of massive protests took place in Brazil (Bringel & Pleyers, 2017). Sparked by a youth-led movement against public transit fare hikes in major Brazilian cities, those protests surprisingly turned into demonstrations against a broad range of political institutions. Grounded in an impeding economic crisis, and fueled by Brazilian corporate media's anticorruption crusade aimed at weakening popular support for the worker's party, which had won the four previous presidential elections, multiple groups representing a large spectrum of political agendas summoned their constituencies to the streets and competed to dominate the movement's agenda. One dramatic consequence was that traditional forms of collective political action were unsettled, especially as social media played a growing role in mobilizing the masses, both on the right and on the left side of the political spectrum. Whereas at the national level this also led to the rapid rise of right-wing groups, including extremists calling for the country's return to a dictatorship, a strikingly different instantiation of this "newest" type of movement took place in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, from November of 2015 to January of 2016. In that period, tens of thousands of students from public schools joined their efforts to achieve the

Over the past few years, new forms of socialization of politics through social media have found expression in collective mobilizations. The paper examines the case of the recent uprisings in Brazil. It presents the results of a qualitative research carried out between June 2013 and June 2015, with focus on the actors involved, their reasons to participate, as well as the continuity of their action. Three research tools were used in the study: social media mapping, an online survey and interviews with activists. The findings give credit to the existence of a connective logic on the social networks, as they illustrate that what attracted the masses in June 2013 was mainly the 'event of a protest'. Nevertheless, political engagement was found to increase in smaller circles, among groups of youth who got involved during the uprisings, and are motivated by the idea of a political resistance up to present days.

Critical Review: Alonso, Mische (2017) “Changing Repertoires and Partisan Ambivalence in the New Brazilian Protests’, published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research., 2018

Angela Alonso, University of São Paulo, Brazil and Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame, USA, investigated the June 2013 Brazil protests in their article “Changing Repertoires and Partisan Ambivalence in the New Brazilian Protests’, published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. This critical review aims at introducing and contextualizing the events in addition to indicating the effectiveness of the thesis, arguments and structure of the piece of work. In early June 2013, several Brazilians marched on city streets following general public disaffection regarding state inefficiency. Following global (autonomist and socialist) and local (patriotic) repertoires of contention, the June protests combined hybrid political performances from two distinct action fields displacing the earlier prevalence of socialist repertoires. Alonso and Mische set that the diversity of actors, and claims consist on a cycle of protest and that it deviates from a single student movement. The authors drew up the rejection of political parties as a trigger for protest and raised broader questions regarding the correlation between political parties, institutional politics and social movements in the waves of protest.

I actively participated in street protests of Rio and Brasília. But that was in the late 1980s, and our collective experience was significantly different from the recent 2013 events, as well as from former 1960s mobilizations, all hallmarks in the modern history of popular movements in Brazil. 2013 was unique in organizational expression and ideological orientation, but even stranger was the socioeconomic timing of the protests, during a period of relative prosperity in the nation. The confusion is evident in the multitude of recent analyses. While agreeing with the general claim that 2013 expresses a "crisis of representation" between society and state, this analysis goes beyond, to argue that this crisis expresses a reemerging type of revolutionary subjectivity which, in turn, is being fueled by the dissemination of digital flexibilities propelling a new media imaginary. While partly singular, the Brazilian case also resonates with the current wave of global popular protests, providing elements that suggest new forms of popular mobilization in the making.

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2016

Review of "Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today", 2016

The book was con-ceived as a contribution to one of the major debates in contemporary political theory. Recent popular mobilizations (the indignados in Spain, the aganaktis-menoi in Greece, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, among others) carry a number of prominent features such as a horizontal principle of organization, Internet­based communication strategies, the lack of a leading group or personalities, spontaneity, etc., which is believed to be a sign of a shift from the usual patterns of political and social struggle to new forms of insurgent engagement. Attempts to analyze these movements are marked by the authors of the volume as falling into either of two possible theoretical perspectives. The dichotomy is put in the title of the collection: the biopolitics of the multitude versus the hegemony of the people.

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, 2010

A leader of the Brazilian and Latin American left since the 1960s, Garcia is a longtime advisor to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and currently serves as Chefe da Assessoria Especial do Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil. 2. When I interviewed Andreotti in late 1982, the Brazilian Communist Party was still illegal, if haltingly tolerated, and the country was enjoying greater civil liberties as part of a tense and uncertain shift towards democratization. Our 54 hours of interviews over four months were carefully transcribed by Helena Weiss Gonçalves, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, with the final transcript consisting of 476 single-spaced pages. Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were conducted by the author in Santo André. Translations are the author's unless otherwise noted.

This book analyses the conflicts that emerged from the Brazilian labour movement’s active participation in a rapidly changing political environment, particularly in the context of the coming to power of a party with strong roots in the labour movement. While the close relations with the Workers' Party (PT) have shaped the labour movement’s political agenda, its trajectory cannot be understood solely with reference to that party’s electoral fortunes. Through a study of the political trajectory of the Brazilian labour movement over the last three decades, the author explores the conditions under which the labour movement has developed militant and moderate strategies.

Revista Internacional de Sociología, 2019

This article seeks to understand the trajectory of radicalization in the Catalan 'procés'. Regardless of their formal legal standing, referendum campaigns are distinct political opportunities which also generate further opportunities. Contrary to what some theories of protest would predict, when political opportunities are closed down at national level, and repression toughens, violent escalation leading to fragmentation and ultimately demobilization does not necessarily ensue, at least in the short term. As the Catalan 'procés' illustrates between the mid-2000s and late-2018, the combination of mechanisms such as appropriation of opportunities, downward scale shift and movement convergence can mitigate escalation processes. A dense network of local and grassroots assemblies displaced the previously dominant, major civil society organizations that led mass protests, especially during the 2012-2015 'diadas'. These grassroots actors prioritized the organization of dissent through more direct, more disruptive, but mostly peaceful forms of action. This in turn facilitated movement convergence, based upon solidarization, as it opened up local spaces where the activists from across the spectrum could mobilize together, preempting a clear violent escalation and the emergence of violent splinter groups till late 2018.