“How to Occupy a School? I Search the Internet!”: participatory politics in public school occupations in Brazil

The movement to occupy public schools in the state of São Paulo, carried out by teenage students at the end of 2015, marked yet another series of protests demanding better teaching conditions in Brazil. Adolescents gained a new voice in these events by using the media as a space of mobilization, creating content that will be analyzed in this paper in the light of the concept of participatory politics (COHEN; KAHNE, 2011; JENKINS, 2016) and its interface with youth and technologies. This proposal includes the systematic analysis of the activists’ production (texts, images and videos) in 42 pages of the Facebook social networking site, with the aim of understanding the use of the media and its role in mobilization. The intersection between popular culture, affective engagement and political struggle, evidenced by the analyses, was one of the main outcomes of the work.

Keywords
Youth; Mobilization; Engagement; Media Activism; Participatory Politics