Prefigurative Brazilian ativismo through the lens of the transformative activist stance: renewing radical political imagination through “collectividual” agency

Abstract

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.