Moderator: Lúcia Fernandes (CES)


Overview
This seminar aims to problematise different experiences of resistance that mobilise the language of the commons, especially when they are also organised around environmentalist repertories, exploring the potential of their conceptions and practices twofoldly, that is to say, on the one hand, analysing their possibilities of breaking with the totalitarian logic of capitalism, and on the other hand, discussing their limits and traps. Experiences will be taken from Latin America (Mexico and Brazil) and the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain).

The seminar begins with Sergio Tapia's intervention on "Fighting from, against and beyond the Law: The experience of the IGC in Mexico". The Indigenous Council of Government (ICG) is an innovative proposal, established since the National Indigenous Congress (NIC), to break the armed (military and criminal), informative and even, in many places, physical siege, where the phatic and institutional powers maintain the indigenous communities, peoples and neighbourhoods in Mexico. Representing a different search for the common, with an alternative understanding of what is understood under the modern Western vision as the "environment", the ICG decided to walk together through a concrete institutional outlet of political participation.

Marcela Uchôa will then present "The Dialectics of Work in the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST): Emancipative Political Education and Training of/for the Working Class". In 2005, the Florestan Fernandes National School was inaugurated. Built and maintained by the Landless Rural Workers' Movement, with support from other movements, the school became an international reference for uniting practice with political theory. Throughout the year, militants, leaders and cadres of popular organisations that struggle to build social change study national and international political theory with a focus on various themes such as: the agrarian issue, Marxism, feminism, among others.

In turn, Mónica Soares will present "A twofold political subject? Tensions between the form-autonomy and the commons project". Starting from the data experience of the project "Imagining and crafting for worlds ahead" and acknowledging a tension between form and content in various communising proposals, this presentation argues that the political subject that communises cannot be taken abstractly. The porosity of the right's imaginary and political agenda, which historically has always found support in autonomous community experiences, is an increasingly immediate concern. In times of reprisal of the extreme right, the aim is to reflect on key points in how to think about the construction of commons in the form of an autonomist political project and the problem of co-optation.

Speakers
Sergio Tapia is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Programme "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" (Interdisciplinary Research Institute, CES, University of Coimbra).

Marcela Uchôa is a PhD candidate in Political Philosophy at the University of Coimbra, researcher at the Institute of Philosophical Studies (IFF, UC).

Mónica Soares is a PhD candidate in Human Rights in Contemporary Societies (Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, CES, University of Coimbra).

Aida Fernandes, United in Defence of Covas do Barroso Association
 

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This activity will be accessible through the Zoom platform and will be limited to number of available places.

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