Who We Are

Our research project intends to investigate, from the perspective of Political Science, ways of activism, protest and social resistance emerging after the global economic crisis. This wide theme is approached by different points of view, guided by a wide range of methods and techniques. However, all those points of view are interconnected by the same question, namely: what are the impact and the meaning of activist practices on contemporary democratic politics? The first investigation axis concerns to a theoretical paradigm. Our aim is to analyze critically a wide complex of authors who deal with the relation between activism and politics, which are linked to a diverse range of traditions and theoretical lines. For example, different types of Marxism, Southern Theories, democratic agonism, radical feminism, Reflexive Sociology, Recognition Theories as well as the Post-colonialist Studies are all object of our concerns. The second axis concerns to the factual and empirical understanding of the forms of struggle and social protest peculiar to the contemporaneity, which we intend to start studying in 2014. Comparative studies will be undertaken on the various protests that took the world since the early 2000s and intensified after the economic crisis started in 2008. Thus, criteria such as the relation with the legal-institutional framework, the role of political parties within the movement, the main fighting tactics, the main demands, the economic and institutional context in which emerged the instructions for the use of new information technologies and the internal decision-making processes and movements will be employed in an attempt to compare events as Tahrir Square, Taksim Square, Puerta del Sol, Occupy NY, 14 - N, student strikes in Chile, student protest of students and daily passengers in public transportation in Brazil and strikes in sites of great infrastructure buildings in Brazil, factories that were occupied in Argentina, among others. The third pillar of the scientific program, which is also going to be released in 2014, is more empirical and is dedicated to obtaining primary data on activism and social protest in Brazil, especially about the two major groups of information, taken as relevant to an understanding of the phenomenon from the perspective of political science: i) internal decision-making processes of activist groups, which will ascertain through, for instance, the measurement, according to the Index of Quality of Speech and similar instruments, deliberation within analog forums peculiar to protest groups and ii) demographic and motivational elements of political participation in activist nature, especially in anti-system groups, seeking the surveying of values ​​related, for example, to education, parental education, occupation, religion, militancy and prior use of information technologies by members./div>