Naming the World: Situating Freirean Pedagogics in the Philosophical Problematic of Nuestra América

Abstract

Since the first publication of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Brazil in 1968, the work of Paulo Freire has come to be a source of inspiration to political militants, socially engaged educators and critical scholars throughout the world. In particular many theorists and practitioners working across both the global north and south have seen in Freire’s work rich resources for a renovation of the praxis of emancipatory politics. An important contribution in this volume to this renovation is offered by Sara Motta, developed in dialogue with theorists of Open Marxism, to challenge the monological representative politics of twentieth-century socialism. Instead, according to Motta, the Freirian approach to pedagogy is suggestive of a form of politics that is lived through “the transformation of subjectivity into non-alienated social flows of being, doing, living and loving” (chapter 3, in this volume). Here politics becomes a process of everyday life, of the construction of self that inherently contests the separation between politics and life implied within twentieth-century social democratic and socialist theories of the state.