Get to Know Emancipa University

The Importance of an International Network of Solidarity with our Project

Dear International Correspondents,

As many of you already know, we are living a profound political, economic and cultural crisis in Brazil, with significant attacks on social and political rights, targeting also popular movements and their demands. A moment as such demands extraordinary resistance; to build a support networks to transcend national boundaries and unify struggles in our Latin American continent and around the globe becomes a necessity.

Accordingly, in presenting the Manifesto of Emancipa University, a pioneer project with the purpose of unifying struggles for education inside and outside Brazilian universities, we seek your support. The initiative intends to create a space to organize regular education courses for popular educators and social activists. A space for popular encounters, to build resistance against the conservative advance in Brazil.

The formation of an international support network is essential to allow for similar efforts to connect in other countries: the struggle for public education, against racism, sexism and homophobia, in defense of labor rights, free, critical, and scientific thought, environmental and human rights.

If after reading our manifesto you want to be in solidarity with us, you can sign it here!

A big “Abraço”, as we say in Brazil, and thanks for the support.

Maurício Costa

Daniela Mussi

Alvaro Bianchi

Ruy Braga

Universidad Emancipa

Solidarity with Emancipa University: A Manifesto

In Defense of an Education for the 99%

In 2017, Emancipa Network completed 10 years of existence. Throughout this decade, their popular education initiatives advanced and diversified, reinforcing in the daily lives and horizons of thousands of young people education as a practical form of freedom. Emancipa Network considers itself as a living part of a popular emancipation project for Brazil.

Since its foundation, this popular movement of education strives to diminish the distance between the subaltern classes and the Brazilian university. Given this objective, it promotes the construction of an ample movement of popular pre-university preparatory courses, enabling rural and urban peripheral youth access to university, to share and take ownership of knowledge, participating in its transformation and development, inside and outside the realms of university space. Over time, however, it became clear that it was necessary for this project to go beyond entry exams for access to higher education. Otherwise, we would have to set aside a large percentage of disadvantaged youth who knows of, and approaches popular pre-university preparatory course initiatives.

We want an education for the 99% of the Brazilian population, this requires transforming the very conception of access to education - university education in particular – connecting it to a new vision of education, capable of overcoming the exclusionary notion of culture, knowledge, economics and politics, in our country.

Accordingly, we understand and practice popular education as a political and pedagogical tool that aims to disseminate and permanently recreate knowledge as material force to transform society. It is therefore a concept of formation committed to the needs of the popular classes. In this sense, it should also be an instrument of mobilization, capacity building, and organization strategy of the population centered around their interests.

Emancipa University, forming a national center of popular education projects presented hereof, complements other Emancipa Network initiatives which, in addition to pre-university education covering the work of education in areas suffering from deprivation of liberty, literacy for youth and adults, feminist education, early childhood education and the practice of sports education. These initiatives are running today in 10 states across the country, in more than 30 cities, mobilizing thousands of people.

This national formation center will serve as a key node of this network; a political and pedagogical tool for our educators. But not merely so. It will also serve as a national center of popular education. Emancipa University is part of a broader movement struggling for a new Brazilian society in which subordination can be converted into genuine human autonomy and solidarity.

Emancipa University: Educating the Educators.

The proposal to create a national center for popular education in Brazil - the Emancipa University - departs from a critical reading of a historical experience which includes, amongst other experiences, popular university initiatives that have emerged in the European and Latin American contexts towards the end of the nineteenth century/early twentieth. The "classic" popular universities aimed to "substitute" or "complement" formal education. However, in no way is this our purpose. Ours is a proposal with a view towards political and cultural formation of popular educators.

The experience of popular pre-university preparatory courses - and amongst them, those driven by Emancipa Network - was born precisely out of demands for access to higher education in a peripheral country. The recent expansion of higher education, in addition to the implementation of affirmative action policies (racial and indigenous quotas, and to public schools) in public universities, contributed significantly to their democratization. Nonetheless, access to public university education, free and of quality remains restricted to the few. Knowledge produced in such universities remains unreachable for the many. The democratization of higher education is a process long from being successfully concluded. A few statistics to draw a general picture: in 2013, 14% of the Brazilian population have completed higher education. This ratio reached 34% in OECD countries, 22% in Colombia, 21% in Chile, 19% in Mexico and 18% in Costa Rica.

It is important to emphasize that this is merely one aspect of a multi-faceted problem. Even the aforementioned sector of the population, after being granted access to higher education, has its formative process abruptly interrupted, after obtaining a university degree.

Access to formal post-graduate education (specializations, Master and Doctorate degree programs) tends to be even more restricted, accessible to a much smaller demographic. The process of knowledge and scholarship should be a continuous one; few options are left to those who want to pursue their studies. This obstacle is faced even more dramatically by high school teachers who quickly become distanced from the centers of production and diffusion of knowledge, condemned to the peripheries of an inefficient system.

Just as there is a demand for pre-university education, there exists one for post-university education as well. It is from this plea that Emancipa University stems, as part of a wider social movement fighting for the democratization of education in Brazil. Our goal is, primarily, to meet the demand of formation of popular educators who work in popular education and social movements, offering advanced courses in political and cultural education (see proposed Abstracts below) to enable these educators to familiarize with themes and up to date knowledge produced at the university, thus contributing to stimulate interest in continuous education and, at the same time, the diffusion and transformation of knowledge. It is, therefore, a project for the education of organic intellectuals of the working classes.

In addition to volunteerism, popular university initiatives have historically been marked by the problem of the thematic fragmentation and the anarchic overlapping of unconnected issues arising from the prevailing hyper-specialization predominant amongst academics who were willing to partake in them. The reason behind such drawbacks may be attributed to the fact that such initiatives were often established without an organic and unitary pedagogical project, hence, eventually ended up reproducing the separation between the intellectuals and the masses, academics and non-academics, characteristic of formal higher education milieus. The result in this case was limited to the illustration and dissemination of a catalog of knowledge, disconnected from life experiences and formation needs of popular educators; merely superficial knowledge.

Our goal is not mere illustration, but the promotion of cultural encounters and the political formation of popular educators, strengthening the struggle for public universities by those who are now unable to reach it. Emancipa University courses may also be attended by students of popular preparatory courses as well as a wider audience. The importance of avoiding a superficial and fragmented education need not impeded the development of initiatives in which new themes can be handled in workshops, discussions, conferences, performances, artistic performances, etc. in tandem with the advanced courses. On the contrary, Emancipa University must be a space for a living force, a permanent and dynamic active and reflective movement.

A priority organizes our pedagogical plan, which is that the formation of those new organic intellectuals takes place as a unitary and organic pedagogical project; which can engrave a conscious direction onto the education process and out into effect the critique of contemporary culture and society.

To this end, the engagement of the university intellectual in this project is crucial. On the one hand, it is the participation of experts in its design that makes possible the achievement of advanced courses and dissemination of new advanced knowledge. On the other, this participation allows the formation of a new type of intellectual from the rich pedagogical relationship involving different types of educators, subjects integrated to the formal university system, popular educators engaged in popular pre-university courses and people who travel between the two environments and assume a mediating function.

The dilemma of educating the educators, this, can gain a new solution. In this proposal, different intellectuals educate themselves in the pedagogical process, at the same time educate each other, in other words, connect with life experiences, social and political practices of the popular classes, and thereby enrich the pedagogical practice with a view to overcome their own subaltern status.

A pioneering experience, Emancipa University aims to accomplish the role of coordinating between different popular education initiatives, be a center for the diffusion of practices and knowledge, for the formation of new organic intellectuals from the subaltern classes, principal subjects of the struggle against the isolation of the Brazilian people from Public Universities.

Advanced Courses Program

The first challenge of Emancipa University will be to offer advanced formation courses regularly. The initial proposal is that each course has a weekly dynamic (comprising a total of 10 meetings), using various teaching modules and providing, in addition to exhibition times, the development of products and actions designed to strengthen the movement for popular education.

Such courses will be held on the Emancipa University campus, maintained and organized by the strength and initiatives of the movement and its supporters. If a selection process of course shows strictly necessary due exhaustion of expansion possibilities, it will be based on criteria that allows the strengthening of the social movement, of education, and popular organization, in addition to actors for whom such courses can advance in strengthening their collective struggles.

Below are initial advanced courses’ Abstracts. The idea is that they serve as basic references outlining the educational needs of Emancipa University to future possibilities arising from engagement and dialogue with experts, professors and interested parties.

So, we are open to suggestions and improvement.

Course: "Teacher’s education"

Summary: The objective of this course is to conduct an emancipatory and continuing formation of teachers, with a target audience primarily comprised of students and professionals who participate or intend to participate in Emancipa Network, in pre-university courses in general and / or basic education. We propose to divide the course in two parts. The first, a more general one, where we seek to promote a space for understanding and discussion to exercise educational activities – going beyond formal and non-formal boundaries- guided by the need to give meaning, both reflective and practical, to different forms pedagogic knowledge. In this sense, we need to emphasize the necessity, on the one hand, to strengthen public and critical sense of education, and on the other, we seek to deconstruct the mechanisms of meritocracy, the reproduction of economic inequality, discrimination, racism, sexism and mystification of intellectual knowledge, which are expressions of the naturalization of capitalist education committed to elitist projects.

In the second part, we intend to separately approach the contents of various school disciplines, rethink them and propose initiatives guided by an understanding that sees it possible for all areas of knowledge to be substantialized to intervene and transform a wider social reality. As products emanating from these two steps, activities may be indicated based on experiences in the different spaces of Emancipa Network, in addition to the preparation of materials for studies and the implementation of projects. All such steps should result in the concretization of alternatives, adhering to the collective project of appropriation of knowledge, and the formulation of transformative politics and emancipation.

Course: "Feminism: Political and Intellectual Challenges"

Abstract: The course aims to present in theoretical, historical and political perspective the birth and development of some of the most important feminist ideas of the XX and XXI centuries. Departing, therefore, from the assumption of profound historicity and internal diversity of the feminist thought, as well as the contradictory union between feminist ideas and politics. The course starts with discussing the women’s revolution prior to feminism, or the curiously anachronistic character between women’s politics and feminist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, critical to understanding its specificity. Then proceed to the immediate post-1945 era, and the profound deconstruction of gender that has resulted in a radical transformation of feminine values ​​and the birth of feminism as an autonomous conception of history, economics, of the body and politics. To follow, we will discuss the internationalization and political translation of this "feminist turn" with the emergence of anti-patriarchal feminisms, de-colonial, antiracist, the valuation of domestic work, protection of the body and women's rights, etc. Finally, we will discuss the crisis which feminisms passed through in the context of neoliberal globalization, particularly the split between recognition and distribution that took place amongst activists and intellectuals, as well as the return of "unity" as a political, theoretical, and cultural challenge of contemporary feminist springs.

Course: The "Brazilian Reality"

Abstract: The course aims to interpret the contemporary Brazilian reality. To do so, it aims to retrieve different sources for the analysis of trends that marked national social formation in recent years: the trajectory of Brazilian society since the slavery period until the realization of the country's industrialization project. Therefore, it is necessary to given a close eye to the problem of formation of the state and society under the light of a critical interpretation of the country's reality. Thus, the proposal of the course involves the systematic questioning of Brazilian history through the presentation of key concepts, developed over time to reveal the main contradictions of our contemporary trajectory. First, a discussion of dependency relationships established by the national social structure with the formation of the worldwide market in the seventeenth and nineteenth century. To follow, there is the intricate relationship between the national industrialization project and the problem of the elaboration of our underdevelopment. After, we will face the bristly and messy populism and peripheral fordism. Finally, leaning on these concepts, we will advance in the direction of more contemporary issues; in particular, the relationship between democratization, exploitation, plunder, racial and gender issues, and the advent of Lulism.

Course: "The right to the City"

Abstract: The course aims to place the dispute of the right to the city as a fundamental part of the emancipatory struggles of our time. As a result of the post-industrial capitalist development, urbanization has become not only the stage, but a key player in the survival of capitalism. The permanent expansion, construction and reconstruction of cities as an essential part of the critical development of the capitalist mode of production becomes at the same time, a paradigm for social and human development, also colonizing science, philosophy and the arts. Accordingly, cities controlled by capitalist hegemony have increasingly become the crucial focus of political and class struggles. In this course, we will work with the idea that the right to the city is the right of the working classes (and their peripheral groups, blacks, women's groups, LGBT) - while striving for the city for their own interests - to be protagonists of their own destiny. Thus also, from a historical perspective on the development of the cities, we want to rethink contemporary urban space, looking for a space for reflection that will serve as a guide to action in a Brazil put under questioning since the urban explosion on June 2013. The course will be mainly aimed for urban activists, activists of the housing, transport, education, health, environmental, saraus (poetic hearings) movements, graffiti artists and street performers, etc., with which we want to discuss the strategic nature of the various ongoing struggles.

Help Emancipa University come to life!

Emancipa Network has grown as a popular movement, with a strategic vision; grassroots work for social change. Such action is only possible because we combined militant daily work with self-financing policy and permanent political-pedagogical education.

With the Emancipa University, we come to a new stage. From it will be possible to give advance; a qualitative leap in large-scale formation of new references in popular education. Therefore, we aim to open a base in São Paulo to serve as an education center for social movements, entirely free and plural. In it we will hold the advanced and regular courses, but it will also be a space open to many other initiatives, a magnification, dissemination and organization polo of educative, cultural and political activities of popular classes.

All this also will mean a leap in organization and self-financing of Emancipa Network. We will need to mobilize resources to pay rent, to structure an office, security and maintain the cleanliness of the University, reform and furnish the space, organize a library, ensure materials for everyday usage, etc. For Emancipa University to become a reality and to develop it’s full potential, building a network of collaboration and support is essential.

This fight is also yours.

Support Emancipa University. Sign our manifesto here!

Contact: universidade@redeemancipa.org.br