Overview

This book frames a series of protests occurred in Brazil from 2013 to 2016 as exemplary cases of global trends in contentious politics to analyze the tension between two forms of collective action: the militant (militante) and the prefigurative activist (ativista).  Building on sociology, political science, and psychology, it explores the relationship between protestors' activities and conceptions of political participation with their subjectivity and agency. The protest cycle triggered by the June 2013 events in Brazil gave strength and popularity to repertoires and strategies of collective action uncommon and innovative. Those praxes defied political parties' conventions, highlighted the limitations of militant unionist tradition, and brought prefigurative activism to the Brazilian left-wing agenda. In this book, Andre Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales combines theoretical tools and traditions from South and North America to build an interdisciplinary approach to Political Psychology and answer the question: what psycho-political differences lie behind the disparate forms of political action adopted by militantes (militants) and ativistas (prefigurative activists) in Brazil? Inspired by books of short stories, the chapters discuss different aspects of the distinction between militancy and prefigurative activism. On them, the author deals with problems such as: how are the ongoing changes in Brazilian protest culture connected with the rising popularity of autonomist movements across the globe? What differences does it make rooting protest strategies in principles like resistance or refusal? How does the culture informing militants and prefigurative activists' conduct affect their political goals and horizons? How does militant and prefigurative activist culture relate to militants and prefigurative activists' forms of political consciousness? A Political Psychology Approach to Militancy and Prefigurative Activism: The Case of Brazil will be a valuable tool for social movement researchers from different disciplines interested in understanding how can subjectivity be, at the same time, a determiner of activities performed in collective action, and determined by these same transformative deeds.

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9783031250361

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Andre Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales is a Brazilian political psychologist currently holding a post-doctoral position at Sao Paulo Pontifical Catholic University and pursuing a second PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has years of experience working as a community psychologist in underprivileged neighborhoods and as public policies consultant in Brazil. His work focuses on contemporary social movements, prefigurative activism, and political imagination. At the core of his scholarship lays the desire of understanding how people transform the prevailing social norms in the same process of transforming themselves. Over the last six years, he has been a fellow at the São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP, a leading scientific research funding agency in Brazil.  In the research informing this book, Dr. Sales worked in partnership with renowned sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists in Brazil, the United States and Canada.

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