Collective action and citizen participation are processes known to produce social change. In this post, Udi Mandel Butler shares his research on Rio de Janeiro’s youth and their engagements in participation, social movements and enactment of citizenship. Through the collaborative production of a book, he discovered that these youth engage in both traditional political spaces and innovative forms of struggle in the day to day

Butler, Udi Mandel

LSE Research Online

Communicating bottom-up social developmentThe revolution of the day to day: Young people’s publicaction in Rio de JaneiroCollective action and citizen participation are processes known to produce social change. In thispost, Udi Mandel Butler shares his research on Rio de Janeiro’s youth and their engagements inparticipation, social movements and enactment of citizenship. Through the collaborativeproduction of a book, he discovered that these youth engage in both traditional political spacesand innovative forms of struggle in the day to day.Rio de Janeiro was intensively on the news in the build up to the World Cup this summer. A lot ofnews coverage was devoted to the protests by mainly young people against transport cost rises.This movement aggregated other causes as it grew, taking on various grievances of both thoseimpoverished and the middle class, having FIFA and the government as their target. What wasnoticeable in these mass mobilisations was the role young people played and the resistance totraditional party-political forms of organisation on display. How do young people in Rio de Janeiroparticipate in public action? How do they start their trajectory of participation? What kinds ofmovements, places and practices do they gravitate to and what are their experiences of this?These were the questions I set out to explore in the project Cultures of Participation, whichbeganin May 2005 with the objective of understanding how young people perceive and practicecitizenship in the public sphere in the city of Rio de Janeiro and what concepts such as ‘citizenship’and ‘participation’ mean to them (see Butler 2008, 2009; Butler & Princeswal 2008).[i] While Rio isknown for its inequality, it also possesses a flourishing civil society sector, with non-governmentaland community organisations seeking to combat poverty, discrimination and urban violence andwhose practices have become well known, nationally and internationally.I am sharing here a gostinho (little taste) of a dialogical approach taken as part of this fieldworkwhich was carried out in conjunction with the Brazilian action-research NGO CIESPI  (theInternational Center for Research and Policy on Childhood).Home About Book Links News and Events Resources This site is supported byBookUndergroundSociabilities waspublished byUNESCO in 2013.Click on theimage for freedownload .Social media The revolution of the day to day: Young people’s public action in Rio de Janeiro | Favelas at LSE1 of 5Credit: David Marcos, 2009.Initially we identified 20 different initiatives working with or run by young people, and focusing onsocial justice, community development, citizenship and access to cultural opportunities. Theseinitiatives included community organizations, NGOs, a union, the Gay Movement, the landlessmovement as well as more informal groups such as Hip Hop activists. Following visits andinterviews with coordinators and young people participating in these organisations, we began asecond stage to deepen their stories of engagement and participation. The idea was to go beyondinterviews with young people and initiate a collective process of narration and debate about theirexperiences. As the participants in this phase themselves described, it was a process of reflectionabout ‘their lives inside activism and activism inside their lives’, and the challenges, difficulties andpleasures of their chosen paths.Over a period of nine months a group of seven young people between the ages of 15 and 27,active in diverse groups in the city’s public sphere, met with members of the research team todevelop narratives about their experiences of participation. The result of this process of individualand collective creation is a publication designed by the group containing the narratives theythemselves wrote. The book Nós: A Revolução de Cada Dia (translated as Nós: The Revolution ofthe Day to Day, 2007) presents the trajectories of these young people, focusing on theirparticipation in different groups, movements and projects engaged in a struggle for citizenship andsocial justice.For example, Quênia, a 23-year old woman, has been involved in a number of community artsprojects and a rap group and has been engaged in questions around black women’sempowerment. In her chapter, as in those of the other young people, she narrated the intricateconnections between the personal and the political, reflecting on everyday experiences ofdiscrimination as well as on the processes through which she became engaged in movementstrying to combat the many forms this takes:During pre-school days, if I remember rightly, we were only two black girls in theclassroom – something that has not changed much [in the south of Brazil]. All theteachers were white. On TV all the presenters were white. So what would myreference of beauty be??? […] And this difference I only noticed when my mumarrived with a black doll. You can say that at that moment I was very shocked:‘What do you mean???’ ‘Who told her that I wanted to be different?’ ‘And who toldher that I wanted a BLACK doll??’ Not to say, curly hair. That doll called Luana wasfor me the last straw. How different would I be from my friends who had Xuxa?No one knew who Luana was! I didn’t know and didn’t care. This understanding ofLSE Latam is a joint effort of @lseargentinasoc @LSEsuColombia @LSESUMexicanSoc @CASAUK_org  Chile. Inviting Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and all!Retweeted by Favelas atLSELSE SU Latam @latamlseExpandThere is need for subsidised or free #healthcare for the growing population of older people living in #slums ow.ly/FUTrNFavelas at LSE @FavelasatLSE2h11hTweets FollowTweet to @FavelasatLSELike us on FacebookFavelas at LSE: Adialogue betweenthe UK and Brazil904 people like Favelas at LSE: Adialogue between the UK and Brazil.Facebook social pluginLikeArchiveSubscribe to Favelas at LSEvia EmailEnter your email address tosubscribe to this blog andreceive notifications of newposts by email.The revolution of the day to day: Young people’s public action in Rio de Janeiro | Favelas at LSE2 of 5Credit: Francisco Valdean, 2009.what it is to be the same and what it is to be different I only came to acquire overthe years. (Quênia Lopes in Nós 2007: 35)These themes of being the same, yet different, of the multiplicity of sites of the ‘political’ and howyoung people come to be gradually aware of such issues and engage in action towards socialchange through a number of different forms and spaces, runs through all of the texts in the book.In Quênia’s case, her process of political awakening came through her encounter with Hip Hopculture:When I started going to break-dance circles, I saw happy black people, saw awareblack people. It was a movement of self-affirmation, and I was very happy to bepart of this movement of liberation that was, mainly, freeing my mind. (Nós 2007:36)Coming from diverse fields of action one of the many points in common between the trajectoriesgathered in this book is the sensitive way in which the authors describe their day-to-dayrevolutions, as glimpsed above. These generate a transformative process at all levels of being,whether in the recognition or identification with one’s ethnicity, sexuality and/or with one’scommunity. These processes of change are united by the desire to take responsibility and embarkon a struggle for equal rights, recognition and freedom of expression; for the transformation ofthat which is around us.Both the research team and the research participants believe that this collaborative experimentwas on the whole successful. For us in the research team the experience was also unsettling. Forthrough this encounter we came to reflect upon our own practices as researchers and thelimitations of the conventional university as a site of social transformation.For many of the young people weencountered the question of socialtransformation is not restricted to thetraditional political spaces and institutions,also being present in sites of struggle againstpower in its more diffuse nature. This kind ofpower is present in a culture of machismo, ofhomophobia, racism, elitism, and in the waysof thinking and feeling that they perpetuate.The reflections narrated in the book showhow these oppressive cultures are present inthe day to day, and how it is possible to confront them and effect change. At the same time wecould see that traditional forms of struggle are still present and have great importance amongstyoung people. For example young people are active participants in legislative assemblies, unions,political parties (both conservative and progressive), in student movements, amongst others.“Traditional” and “innovative” forms of political engagement coexist in the public sphere. How thethriving and innovative experiments in public action young people are involved in come to affecttheir own life-journeys and effect deeper structural change in the country’s traditional politicalsystem and culture is an open question worthy of exploration.ReferencesButler, U. M. (2009) Notes on a Dialogical Anthropology, Special issue on ‘Public Anthropology’ inAnthropology in Action, 16(3): 20-31.Butler, U. M. (2008) Children’s Participation in Brazil – a brief genealogy and recent developments.Special Issue on Participation, International Journal on Children’s Rights. Leiden, 16: 301-312.Butler, U. M. & Princeswal, M. (2008) Cultures of Participation: Young people’s engagement in theThe revolution of the day to day: Young people’s public action in Rio de Janeiro | Favelas at LSE3 of 5September 11th, 2014 | Brazil, English | 0 Comments Previous postLeave A Commentpublic sphere in Brazil. NGPA Working Papers Series, London School of Economics: London (also tobe published in Portuguese by a Brazilian Journal).CIESPI (Butler, U. et al, organisers) (2007) Nós: A Revolução de Cada Dia. CIESPI/PUC: Rio deJaneiro. English version here.[i]Other members of the team included Marcelo Princeswal and Roberta Abreu. This research wasfunded by the UK Economic and Social Re- search Council’s Non-Governmental and Public ActionProgramme, which is a multi-disciplinary international research programme designed toinvestigate the variety of ways through which people in different countries organize together tobring about social change.About the AuthorUdi Mandel Butler is a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,University of Oxford and an International Research Fellow at International Centre for Researchand Policy on Childhood, Rio de Janeiro. Recently his research looked at young people’sperceptions of and engagement in public action in Brazil. His most recent project EnlivenedLearning, alongside an international team, is seeking out other imaginings and practices of highereducation around the world who are more purposively and creatively engaged in processes ofcommunity, environmental and personal transformation.The views expressed on this post belong solely to the author and should not be taken as theopinion of the Favelas@LSE Blog nor of the LSE. Please read our comments policy before commenting.Share this:Next post Types of favela mediaactivismOn raids and connectingfavela resistance(s) in Kenyaand BrazilSex workers’ mobilisationagainst discrimination: Anexplicit case for harmreduction methods in BrazilThe revolution of the day to day: Young people’s public action in Rio de Janeiro | Favelas at LSE4 of 5 Notify me of follow-up comments by email. 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The revolution of the day to day: young people’s public action in Rio de Janeiro

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