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.

摘要

2015年的三个月内，在巴西圣保罗，公立高中学生进行了前所未有的成功抗议，迫使州长放弃了合并学校的计划，这可能会导致人满为患并减少其数量。通过与社交媒体的直接协作而不与机构建立直接联系，学生们占领了数百所学校，反映出以比喻为特征的社会运动的最新趋势实践。社会学文献一直在努力对比喻政治的核心维度进行理论化，这些核心维度与各种各样且经常在政治上引起争议的实践有关。我们认为，定义预言性做法需要将代理和人的发展理论化为社会转型合作项目不可或缺的一部分，而维格茨基的项目由安娜·斯捷琴科提出的“变革积极主义者姿态”（TAS）方法扩展了，可以为这种理论化做出贡献。TAS提供了概念工具来分析个体和集体代理的辩证法，以寻求与变革实践相关的追寻未来。根据高中职业的案例研究，