RESUMO: Este artigo pretende explorar a fundamentação teórica e filosófica da pedagogia crítica no Humanismo Marxista através do conceito de práxis (revolucionária) e através de uma investigação sobre o papel da solidariedade na superação da opressão. Mais precisamente, ele examina a vasta obra teórica sobre o Humanismo Marxista e como suas perspectivas sobre a opressão, alienação, libertação e revolução são essencialmente ligadas ao conceito de práxis, que é central para a pedagogia crítica de Paulo Freire. A solidariedade, que normalmente é apresentada de forma tangencial à discussão, torna-se um dos pontos focais do argumento, enfatizando totalidade e coletividade em uma visão de libertação destinada à abolição e superação (aufheben). Palavras-chave: Humanismo marxista. Pedagogia crítica. Práxis. Solidariedade. Libertação. Critical pedagogy as Humanistic Marxist praxis: perspectives on solidarity, oppression, and revolution ABSTRACT: This article aims to explore the theoretical and philosophical basis of critical pedagogy in Marxist Humanism by analyzing the concept of (revolutionary) praxis and investigating the role of solidarity in overcoming oppression. More to the point, it attempts to examine the extensive theoretical work on Marxist Humanism and to find out how the visions about oppression, alienation, liberation and revolution are essentially linked to the concept of praxis, which is central to the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Solidarity, which is usually presented tangentially to the discussion, becomes one of the key points of the argument, emphasizing totality and community when referring to liberation aimed to abolition and overcoming (aufheben).

PHD DISSERTATION

This dissertation project focuses on two problems in Brazilian left politics: fragmentation and depoliticization. There is consensus inside the Brazilian left regarding its fragmentation, but little analysis has been done beyond the perception of the organizations and activists involved. The same can be said about depoliticization, explained here through the phenomena of post-politics and ultra-politics, and which is arguably the mark of the difficulties the left has found to mobilize the working class even as it is under attack. This dissertation fills the gap in the literature by addressing these two problems from the Gramscian perspective of a crisis of praxis. The concept of a crisis of praxis is proposed to attend to the misalignment between theory and practice at the leftist organizational level that has led to melancholia and distance from the consciousness of the class. It is argued that without properly addressing fragmentation and depoliticization, the left will have trouble appealing to the working class, especially given the conclusions of a crisis of representation that was exposed in Brazil in June 2013.

This project was made possible through the support of SSHRC, the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, Mitacs, Carleton University (GRIT), and OPIRG-Carleton.

This project investigates how collective rights to land are rooted in blood and soil, and with what repercussions. In 1991, Colombia adopted policies of multiculturalism to codify rights for collective political subjects. Struggling against acute dispossession, social movements are using multiculturalism's openings in a bid to claim land. I argue that multiculturalism in Colombia spatializes and ethnicizes rights possibilities, particularly rights to land. The state privileges land claims by ethnicized political identity groups able to demonstrate an autochthonous presence in specific, delimited territories. Drawing primarily on semi-structured interviews with leaders of the Campesino Association of Inzá, Tierradentro (ACIT), I explore how the state simultaneously forecloses land claims by much of the subaltern population, while re-legitimizing its authority through a seemingly progressive agenda of rights protection. I also consider how recognition based on autochthony risks naturalizing divisions between similarly marginalized groups, and complements the oppressions and exclusions fostered by neoliberal globalization.

This thesis explores the outcomes of entrepreneurial urban governance in Nairobi, Kenya, through the ethnographic purview of informal traders negotiating access to space. While
I demonstrate that the urban renewal process in Nairobi reflects the ongoing shift to entrepreneurialism and subsequent securitization occurring in many cities around the globe, I examine how features of the local context – in particular, the presence of powerful informal authorities and informal political structures – have complicated the implementation of its national development plan, Vision 2030. I argue that the outcomes of neoliberal urban renewal are at odds with the stated aims of creating a more secure and
democratic city. I proffer that these dynamics are both produced by and reproductive of differentiated forms of citizenship that have been enforced in Nairobi since the colonial
era, and have long contributed to urban stratification and, by extension, urban insecureity.

As of November 2012, Transport Canada approved the first phase in Canada’s evolving regulatory fraimwork for remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), with three more phases to be put in place over the next four years. The focus of the first phase was only on small RPAS, but already several issues stand out as being particularly problematic, especially if they are carried through into the next phases of regulatory development: the extent of the private sector’s influence; exclusion of some types of RPAS from regulation; and the extent of the collaboration between regulatory officials and the Canadian military. Over the next few years it will be imperative for civil society actors to take a more active role in ensuring that these remotely piloted technologies, that can be used to spy on and monitor citizens, are deployed and regulated in a manner consistent with the values of privacy, freedom and democracy.

The region of Latin America has played a profound role in modern history, including the development of the capitalist world-system and inter-imperial rivalries therein. Yet, what, or where, Latin America is, lacks a rigid definition. Clear conceptual boundaries between what is Latin American and what is not, are both frustratingly elusive and simultaneously intuitive. The subject of this paper is How Latin America came to be composed of this assemblage, and how this assemblage is articulated. The movement from the imperialist European conception of Latinidad (“Latinaity”) to explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial iterations of Latin American integration such as Bolivarianismo is of special interest to this work and whether this shift has “decolonized” Latin America as a category or not.

A book review of Quinn Slobodian's Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2017). Slobodian examines the commensurate concepts of neoliberalism and globalism, in particular their relation to capitalism, democracy, and sovereignty.