Researching Protest Literacies

Literacy as Protest in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

Jamie D. I. Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000294606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

By focusing on the textually mediated reactions of local residents, social movements, and media producers to policy changes implemented in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this book studies the development of literacy as a tool to mobilize, perform, and disseminate protest.

Researching Protest Literacies presents a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research to analyse how traditional and technology-driven literacy practices informed a new cycle of social protest in favelas from 2006-2016. Chapters trace nuanced interactions, document changing power balances, and in doing so conceptualize five forms of literacy used to enact social change - campaigning literacies, memorial literacies, media-activist literacies, arts-activist literacies, and demonstration literacies. Building on these, the study posits protest literacies as a new way of researching the role of contemporary literacy in protest.

This insightful monograph would be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars involved in the fields of literacy studies, arts education, and social movement studies, as well as those looking into research methods in education and international literacies more broadly.

Part I

Introduction and Background

1Wheres and Whys of Researching Protest Literacies

This book is about protest from several particular perspectives. First, the setting is distinctive in that the protesting I describe revolves around so-called global ‘mega-events’ including the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympics Games, which became associated in their local realizations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with highly contentious forms of governance. Why exactly and how would people demonstrate against such world-renowned events? In this book, I present answers to these questions situated locationally in Rio’s low income housing areas known as favelas, and more precisely, in one set of favelas named Maré.

Second, unlike any other monograph of this setting or protest more broadly the approach I adopt focusses on literacy. The concern with literacy here is not therefore with notions of educationalist ‘skills’ perhaps most commonly associated with this term (see Papen 2005). Developing on a research tradition known as the New Literacy Studies (see Gee 2000, 2015, Street 2003), instead the orientation is towards understanding particular roles and meanings of writing in society (Basso 1974, Szwed 1981, Heath 1983), the social uses of literacy (Prinsloo & Breier 1996), and especially literacy conceptualized in terms of social practices (Scribner & Cole 1981, Street 1984, Barton & Hamilton 2012) – that is, all slightly differing ways of referring to the same kinds of phenomena (Papen 2012). What for instance were the roles of literacy in the mobilizing, performing, and disseminating of demonstrations and interrelated activities such as the campaigning of social movements? Moreover, in what ways can attention to literacy as a part of such activities help to explain beyond singular events how long-term periods of protesting develop, sustain, and subside? This book offers localized answers to these questions as well.

The study is the result of research carried out across multiple sites in Rio from 2013–2014 based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research thereafter. It also draws on my own personal experiences of living and working in Rio since 2005 as well as my professional background and education both in the UK and Brazil across the fields of social housing, adult education, and applied linguistics – where relating to the latter, I researched Brazilian social practice and critical approaches to literacy alongside Anglophone approaches (e.g. Freire 2018, Freire & Macedo 2005; see also Andreotti 2011, Castanheira 2013, 2018, Kleiman 1995, Lopes et al. 2019, Magalhães 1995, Marinho 2013, Soares 1995, Souza 2015). Freire’s well-known work in Brazil is a reference point in the general sense of its attention to how literacy and communication at particular social and political moments can and have become orientated towards critique, transformation, and indeed, where necessary, protesting based upon principles and practices of social justice (Freire 2004). Whilst my research is not framed specifically in terms of participatory action research (Torres 1992, Morrow & Torres 2002) closely associated with such Freirean critical literacy, its combination of ethnographic and historical documentation is however based on a social justice perspective politically aligned with historically oppressed social spaces in Rio and the protesting of respective social groups (see Chapter 3 on my methodological approach and criticality).

Why favelas and why protesting in them? The short answer to that question concerns simultaneity and strength of feeling. That is, my initial research focus was not protest but critical literacy and adult education. The commencing of my fieldwork and the places in which it developed co-occurred, however, temporally with the largest and most sustained period of protests in Brazil and Rio for thirty years, and locationally with one of the hotspots of contention in Rio’s periphery at the time. Through my participating in these unfolding events and realizing their personal, social, and historical relevance, I started to focus more and more on documenting protesting underway during this distinctive moment, and especially so in one set of favelas where I had previously planned to research adult education projects, but where protests were both occurring and becoming increasingly significant around the time owing to reasons which I will explain.

A longer answer but one that can still only really be glossed here concerns my own personal trajectory. Born in 1976, I was brought up in England by two transgender people and one cis gender person during a time and in a place in which misunderstanding and prejudice was much more extreme than at the time of writing in 2020. Of my three parents, two were from traditional working-class backgrounds and the other from a more affluent academic-scientific one. Meanwhile, throughout my childhood until reaching late adolescence I was epileptic and suffered from seizures. These factors meant from an early age I became sensitized to certain issues of diversity and perspectives based on these in relation to certain assumed societal norms. However, it was travelling substantially and starting work that ultimately informed my political outlook more directly than my family and upbringing in small rural racially white towns in England. I left home in my late teens and I ended up living in shared housing and squats in London where following related volunteering and part-time employment I got a job as an ‘outreach worker’ with homeless and vulnerably housed communities. I did this full-time for four years and gained my first training in ethnographic-related methods in doing so because it was necessary to carry out needs assessment interviewing and to do case study work relating to people’s histories of housing, health, education, and employment. Around the same time I also trained in language and literacy teaching, which amongst other work in adult education I put to use with immigrant day-centre users who had only very basic levels of English as an additional language or none at all, and with low-educated British homeless people who required functional language skills to access services and employment. The point of these funded activities under the then UK Labour government was to engage and link into statutory and voluntary services long-term economically and socially ‘excluded’ people. This job impacted strongly on my life and I would probably have remained doing it if love and later marriage had not directed me to Brazil. After living together for three years in London, from 2004 I moved to live in Brazil with my partner who was from Rio de Janeiro and wanted to return home. On moving to Rio, I attempted to work in the homelessness sector but I did not speak Portuguese sufficiently at the time and there were few opportunities. Soon after, however, local contacts put me in touch with an adult education project and community crèche in a favela that was looking for volunteers to teach functional English and produce pedagogical materials for receptionists, taxi-drivers, and other jobs that required this, as well as for local children. In 2005, this was then the start of my involvement with and interest in favelas (in this case, one called Rocinha). Amongst other places in Rio, I would later live in two other favelas (Vidigal, Chico Mendes) for a year in total as well as in the northern periphery of the city (Piedade) for another two years before settling in Rio's port area (Morro da Conceição). In these years that followed, through friends and contacts I started to attend cultural and political events across favelas in Rio, including in the two examples perhaps most commonly associated with social movement activities (Complexo do Alemão, Complexo da Maré). The latter is the ‘complex’ or set of favelas where I would later do PhD fieldwork and it is the main setting of this book. I first visited Maré in 2006 to get to know and potentially collaborate with one particular NGO there but at that time I did not meet people aligned with what I was looking to do nor did I develop any lasting contacts. Very differently in 2013 as part of my doctoral research I would return to the Maré favelas and in so doing this time I encountered people, local practices, and indeed highly particular scenarios that would influence both me and my fieldwork significantly. As I describe through Chapters 2 and 3, owing to these meetings in Maré, and simultaneous developments in Rio de Janeiro over 2013–2014, protesting in Maré became the focus of my fieldwork and this book.

A Brief Introduction to Favelas, the Maré Favelas, and Social Movements

In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro (Figure 1.1) is commonly known as ‘the Marvellous City’ for its wealth of natural beauty and rich cultural heritage. The capital until 1960, it remains the national centre for many of Brazil’s most powerful economic and cultural institutions. It is also, however, a city of marked social inequality, where at the time of writing this book, 1.4 of approximately 6 million people were living in favelas.¹

Figure 1.1 Map of Rio de Janeiro municipality

Credit: Google maps

There are two kinds of generalized histories of favelas that I encountered regularly whilst living in and researching Rio. One is inclined toward mid-term historical archival details, the other towards the longue durée and explicit political ideology. In the former, the name favela and the way in which a wide range of differing kinds of low income and governmentally irregular housing areas became referred to commonly under this name originated in late nineteenth century Brazil. That is, the word favela actually derives from a resilient hillside plant in the north-east of Brazil, a region from where soldiers would return after the 1896–1897 War of Canudos against religious separatists (see da Cunha 2010). According to this version, claiming that they had been promised lands but not given them, it was these returning soldiers who built or at least developed further the first settlements in Rio’s hills that would be referred to as a favela (Valladares 2019). Following this origin story, more concretely, the hillside favelas nowadays characteristic of Rio would become increasingly prominent shortly afterwards, as poor houses (cortiços) and squatted buildings in the city centre were knocked down during an extensive period of modernist urbanizations at the turn of the century from around 1902–1906 onwards (Benchimol 1992). During this period, and others similar that ensued over the century thereafter (see Brum 2013), both enforced evictees and newly arriving migrant workers moved up into consolidating hill settlements nearby. Ongoing throughout the twentieth century, favelas then expanded further upwards in the city centre and affluent southern coastal areas, and later outwards into Rio’s extending northern and western peripheries. This was increasingly so from around the 1950s onwards following what became a particularly rapid and intensive national transition from rural to urban living (e.g. a shift from approximately 30–80% of the Brazilian population from the 1950s to 2000s; Amaral 2013), and indeed one that inevitably encountered on arrival, in Rio’s case, a lack of affordable legal hou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Translation and Transcription
• PART I Introduction and Background
• PART II An Emerging Cycle of Protest 2006–2013
• PART III A Continuing Cycle of Protest 2014–2016
• PART IV Conclusions and Contributions
• Index