قلمرو آموزش و آموزش قلمرو در زمینه های فقر شدید شهری در آرژانتین: بین مدیریت و خواری

We are living in a time when large masses of workers have become large masses of the unemployed and, to borrow Butler’s term, their bodies constitute an army of bodies that don’t matter. This is probably one of the greatest dilemmas in our society, in the globalized world and in regions like Latin America in particular. In the framework of governmentality studies, this paper presents advances in research geared towards characterizing schooling practices in contexts of extreme urban poverty, specifically in an area on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with one of the highest concentrations of shantytowns. Starting in the late 1960s with the crisis in Fordism and the closing of factories, a dense population has come to inhabit these urban spaces in the midst of a process of extreme decay. I will focus, in this work, on the characteristics that I understand to distinguish the pedagogical devices and processes of subjectivation bound to the configuration of these abject territories.

For the last four years, I have been conducting an ethnographic research project in three schools in Argentina that operate in contexts of extreme urban poverty. In this article, I focus on the characteristics of pedagogical devices evident in these schools after years of educational reform and a series of social and economic crises that, in Latin America in general and Argentina in particular, have meant a steady impoverishment of the population and the steady growth of neighborhoods that are often called “shantytowns.” The questions I explore about these pedagogical devices revolve around their relationship to the processes of subjectivation in these urban territories. I suggest that there is a continuum between the school territory and the neighborhood territory, both of which are marked by a management logic that has left a large portion of the population to its own devices. Here, I discuss the nature and forms of schooling in times when biopolitics no longer takes the form of making live and letting die ( Grinberg, 2008, Rabinow and Rose, 2006 and Rose, 2007).