Wednesday, December 6th at 9am Pacific StandardTime.
Guest Speaker: Andre Sales, Brazilian political psychologist and a post-doctoral fellow at Sao Paulo Pontifical Catholic University.
Andre Sales will be discussing Chapter 3 of his book on A Political Psychology Approach to Militancy and Prefigurative Activism at our next Coffee Hour. Chapter 3 is focused on events in the winter of 2015-16 when students occupied more than 200 public high school facilities in the state of Sao Paulo to prevent the state from closing their schools. The chapter connects the Brazilian sit-ins with the broader transformations in contentious politics taking place around the world. Andre uses a sociohistorical approach to human development to discuss the relevance of future-oriented actions, commitments, and agency to understand how people grow and change throughout their lives. His talk will be an invitation to researchers in the social sciences to address the challenge of theorizing how people interpret their world while changing it.
If you are interested in attending, please hit reply to this email. As is out custom, participants are asked to read the text and send a question or comment to mcole@ucsd.edu. Your input is important for enriching the discussion and ensuring that it is inclusive of the many voices present.
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I have just joined Cultural Praxis and will do my best to attend the coffee hour on Wednesday the 6th.
As a South African, who is old enough to have lived through the apartheid years & the transition, I am absolutely fascinated with this topic. It is the first time I have encountered the concept of “prefiguration” & it sparks so many thoughts of what was happening in SA during the eighties – both in education and in industrial relations. There are so many similarities between SA & Brazil & some key differences.
While I remain extremely positive about the potential of South Africa, I have to admit that we have lost our way in terms of the envisaged post-apartheid vision.
So we may need a post-prefiguration – not just progress since 1994, but a cultural historical/socio-historical review – back to the eighties. Now I’m wandering off into the need to write.