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The Epistemology of Violence pp 115–158Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

How Violent Epistemology Shapes the Contexts Surrounding Schools: Brazil, São Paulo, and the Baixada

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Part of the book series: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice ((CPTRP))

Abstract

This chapter begins to demonstrate how the conceptual framework developed in Chaps. 3 and 4 applies in practice, by showing how violent epistemology has shaped the global, national, local, and historical contexts in which schools are situated. Using the case-study school of DCX in São Paulo, Brazil, this chapter demonstrates how violent epistemology can be seen to have shaped Brazil’s colonisation and transformation into a society marked by extreme social inequality which, despite the country’s economic growth, has persisted throughout the industrial and neoliberal eras, to produce a scenario in which inner-city neighbourhoods marked by social neglect, violent crime, poor quality housing, and destitution are actively perpetuated by the enactment of violent epistemology at a range of structural levels.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My use of the term ‘underclass’ in this book refers to the phenomenon of social stratification in Brazil, which can be seen as a symptom of ideology, and in which certain individuals and sectors of society are subject to stigmatising and exclusionary discourse and practices, and treated as belonging to a separate ‘underclass’. This is not to be misinterpreted as an agreement with such discourse, or as an agreement with the reduction of diverse individuals to simple (e.g. class) categories. As already mentioned, the ideologies that foster this can be seen as global in nature, but this phenomenon is especially pronounced in Brazil due to the country’s particular history.

  2. 2.

    This included the violent repression of school children at the end of 2015, who were sprayed with tear gas, beaten, shot at with rubber bullets, and arrested when protesting public school closures in São Paulo which were to be carried out in the name of efficiency savings (Attanasio 2015).

  3. 3.

    In 2001, the average income of whites was twice that of non-whites (Schwartzman 2003).

  4. 4.

    Instead of offering out share ownership to the public, privatisation authorities chose to transfer the assets of public enterprises to a select group of long-established major domestic and foreign investors (Amann and Baer 2002).

  5. 5.

    Indeed, following a recent resurgence of the Brazilian far-right, Worker’s Party President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in August 2016 (Watts 2016), and former ‘pro-poor’ Worker’s Party president Lula jailed on allegedly false corruption charges in April 2018, in an apparent attempt by the far-right to keep him from being re-elected (Treece et al. 2018).

  6. 6.

    BRICS refers to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—a group of countries considered to be major emerging national economies.

  7. 7.

    My use of the term ‘neo-hygienist’ is based on analyses of how hygienist thought shaped São Paulo’s development throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—a period in which ‘hygiene’ meant ‘sanitising’ the poor and ‘cleaning’ them from the city (Sobrinho 2013). Local researchers Kohara (2009), Canton (2007), and Frúgoli (2000) who have all spent significant time researching the neighbourhood in which the case-study school is located, discuss how recent initiatives to ‘cleanse the [area] of street vendors, street children, beggars and the unemployed’ (ibid., p. 102), and enforce the degradation of tenements so as to increase land value for property development (Kohara 2009), represent a resurgence of hygienist attitudes. Frúgoli (2000) has called this a ‘new sanitation’ of the city.

  8. 8.

    The positivist thought of Aguste Comte had a strong influence in Brazil in the nineteenth century, so much so that the motto written on Brazil’s flag ‘order and progress’ is directly inspired by his words.

  9. 9.

    Another example is how these attitudes were found amongst administrative workers in the city’s education system: when visiting schools, the workers from the Regional Directorate of Education who accompanied me would cry ‘hold your noses and secure your handbags!’ as we entered poor neighbourhoods.

  10. 10.

    The Movimento Sem Teto (roofless movement) aims to tackle Brazil’s housing deficit by occupying empty buildings as group squats. When housed in high-rise apartment blocks the occupations are often called ‘vertical favelas’, due to the poverty of their inhabitants and their illegal nature.

  11. 11.

    This data is from 1997. According to Canton (2007) this situation has since worsened.

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  1. Norwich, Norfolk, UK

    Beth M. Titchiner

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Titchiner, B.M. (2019). How Violent Epistemology Shapes the Contexts Surrounding Schools: Brazil, São Paulo, and the Baixada. In: The Epistemology of Violence. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12911-8_5

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