Pedagogies of Occupation

My current book project, Pedagogies of Occupation, argues that disputes over how young people in Rio de Janeiro should occupy their time fundamentally alter the routines, habits, and life trajectories of a generation of Brazilians. I bring together a number of sites of analysis—after-school programs, zones occupied by militarized police forces, and student-led protests—under the rubric of occupation, in its military, political, professional, spatial, and temporal senses. In so doing, Pedagogies of Occupation contributes to and draws together anthropological and interdisciplinary conversations on education, security, the everyday, time, and social movements.

I’ve released two articles on this research. The first, “Pedagogies of Prohibition” (Cultural Anthropology 2022) traces the proximity between hard (policing) and soft (educational) anti-drug interventions, arguing that if disputes over prohibition frequently hinge on control over territory, pedagogies of prohibition leverage the subject-making potential of everyday schedules and time-bounded habits. The second, “Camera Ocupa” (Current Anthropology, 2020), tells a multimodal story of youth protestors occupying their schools that takes as its starting point both the photographs of the ethnographer and those of the occupiers, cultural production in their own right, and proposes a methodology that proceeds by retroactively mining the gap between the two for insights.

Images from Pedagogies of Occupation