ILPC 2026

The study from which this article originated was developed amid an important national cycle of protests in opposition to a constitutional amendment that established a cap limiting the growth of federal government spending to the rate of inflation for 20 years, and to a bill introducing radical changes in high school curriculum. Both reforms were proposed by the government that took power after the Brazilian parliamentary coup of May 2016 and ended up being approved by the parliament at the end of this year. These projects were opposed by massive student’s movements and university strikes, among others.  At the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre), a technical-administrative staff strike lasted 44 days, and a teachers’ strike 21 days. We were part of the strike commands – one of us is an administrative staff (and an MsC student at that time), the other a teacher. Both of us are members of the research group Organization and Liberating Practice, based at the School of Administration. At this group, we have been studying Marx and Marxist authors, such as Henri Lefebvre. Therefore, it was quite obvious that we could interconnect these two spaces (militancy and academy) with the help of Levebvre’s (2014) propositions on the critical knowledge of everyday life.

The aim of this militant research was to analyse the everyday construction of these strikes, taking into consideration the living and the lived experience of workers and its meaning to potentially transform their everyday life. Lefebvre (2014) provided the theoretical support to analyse conflicts, practices, ruptures, discontinuities, repetitions and creations, mainly through categories such as ambiguity, alienation, moments and possibilities.

The data were collected during the strikes, but also complemented with social network information and interviews with members of the strike commands after the end of the movements. The rupture with labour’s mechanic repetition of everydayness, the recognition of the importance of cohesion beyond the hierarchies determined by the university structure, and the widening of the horizon of possibilities for the movements participants were some of the research’s conclusion.

Another relevant aspect is that these strikes were not organized in defence or to achieve goals directed related to conditions of work. They were organized, in alliance with the student’s movement that occupied more than 40 buildings in different campuses, in defence of the education system as a whole, providing a space for mutual recognition that went beyond tactic alliances involving the three sectors of the university community. The everyday collective construction of this movement made evident the importance and potentialities of articulating and supporting each other in each specific workplace struggle while, at the same time, being intensively involved with the wider context of social struggles.

Reference

Lefebvre, H. The critique of everyday life. London: Verso, 2014.