“If the present is a struggle, the future will be ours”: The FUBA’s student movement and the generation of activism through political aesthetic practice in Buenos Aires, Argentina
This thesis considers the complex relationship of the organisational body of the Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires (the Student Federation of the University of Buenos Aires, FUBA) with the student movement it articulates. Taking the case of Buenos Aires, Argentina, it explores how a troubled local and regional political history - of recurring episodes of violent repression and socioeconomic crises - has generated alternative forms of politics, based on horizontal relationships and autonomy vis-à-vis institutionalised State politics. The thesis examines one particular instance of alternative, radical politics to explore the ways in which the emergence of these alternative approaches to the political may have promoted a political form that generates new ways of community making and learning. The thesis explores how members of the FUBA - together with other heterogeneous social movements and social organisations - have defined their emergence as political agents over time and propose to interpellate students through a range of political and aesthetic practices that entail the re-appropriation and production of space, developing connections between theory and practice, and engaging with militant practices relating to collective memory, thereby reflecting and altering the urban spaces in which the movement unfolds. The thesis argues for a connection between the dimension of the aesthetic, t he sensorial, and the development of the political. And it contributes to the anthropological study of social movements, protest, union, and activist research
