We live times of transformation, although black ecological and moral clouds appear in-front of us. Transformation no longer has a progressive connotation from the time being. By the eighties, neoliberalism claimed the future. Those who call for resistance were not able to show another way to live. All through the years, xenophobia and racism, irrationality, gained citizenship minds. Nowadays,they are dominant. Oppression and repression policies presented as sincere hate to scapegoats are appreciated by voters, fed up with false promises and corruption.
Among professionals, there are those who seem oblivious to the anxieties of our time.Others, those who develop their work guided by empathy with the oppressed, are themselves oppressed because of their professional views and actions. In the social sciences fields, the project of overcoming social philosophy and becoming science was abandoned. As Foucault has shown, social sciences knowledge serves those in power, serves to legitimate states´ action. Idealized as the protector of the oppressed, it is above all the misogynist and hierarchical mode of organization that has become a center of classificatory and functional oppression. Unfortunately,uncritically revered by the social sciences, be they academic, critical or professional.
Can this be changed? Can one denounce the complicity of the social sciences with the state and its estrangement from the construction of different futures?
Paulo Freire taught that school and learning can be an instrument of emancipation, if students and teachers are helped to discover and denounce the oppression they endure as habit. Once that work is done, it is the responsibility of each one to do whatever it takes to keep from being oppressed. Shearing this hope, the school beyond the social sciences wants to become a center for documenting the stories of disclosure of oppression habits. The inspirations comes from denunciation of state crimes committed in prisons and is therefore aware of the complicity of the state in covering up such crimes at the expense of the lives of state disqualified people – are there more criminals in prisons than in certain boards of CEO?
The social sciences option to engage on serving the state-economy alliances with justifications, claiming rationality and modernity of this manner of thinking,deserve severe critical stance. It considers people’s lives, especially those of abandoned and stigmatized people.
The school beyond the social sciences has no classes, no chairs, no teachers. It is a way of collaborative knowledge production by creating networks that denounce present oppression cases. Regardless the religious and partisan convictions of each one, the school envisage to put together and to use and diffuse descriptions of injustice registered in the documentation center. The purpose is to break with the power commitments of the current social sciences and to open space and time to consider the survival struggles well known of the excluded and oppressed populations. The school will struggle to break the cognitive and intellectual patrolling of the current universities against all theoretical instruments emancipation and oppression awareness.
In anticipation of what will eventually result from this work, we denounce the way the concept of nature has become a way of designating what can be legitimately exploited, and how the part of humanity that recognizes itself oppressed is represented as weak, therefore an integral part of nature, i.e., susceptible to exploitation and stigma. If the school beyond the social sciences has the task of enunciating instances of oppression using the first person, in empathy, it is to be expected that the school will be represented as part of nature and subject to special measures of oppression.
The organization of the school, in a network of nodes with no organic relation between them, will take place around a documentation center whose authors can be anonymized, as they wish. The training activities financed according to the oppressive rules in force are invited to use the documentation center materials,eventually opening to the propose of the school: gathering knowledge about oppressive situations and make them available to anyone.
OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
António Dores (5 de Dezembro de 2018). SCHOOL beyond SOCIAL SCIENCES. Para que serve a Sociologia? Recuperado em 14 de Dezembro de 2024 de https://doi.org/10.58079/ubdh