Luta is dedicated to action research: since 2015, we have been working to bring together academic research fueled by practice, and a practice that, in turn, teaches and transforms research. Around this, we carry out the documentation of utopian experiences in Floripa and the world, we promote events to put in contact and carry forward the networks and knowledge of these experiences, and we experiment with heterodox pedagogical processes for the formation-deconstruction of our thinking. Check out some of the projects we have already carried out below.
Floripa, Utopic City
In 2016 and 2018, Luta promoted the exhibition of social transformation initiatives Floripa, Cidade Utopia. Over the course of a day, the meetings brought together dozens of collectives, organizations, social movements, projects, etc. that work to improve the city and the lives of the people who live in it, offering alternatives to the ways of getting around, producing, living together, feeding, learning, buying, discarding, using urban space, informing and organizing. The initiatives were grouped into “islands” by theme and invited to interact with each other and with the public, who were also able to participate in seminars, workshops and debates throughout the day. In the first Floripa, Cidade Utopia, more than 1000 people circulated at the UFSC Events Center. The second edition, carried out with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) within the scope of the National Science and Technology Week, reached around 500 people.
The I Sultopias – Seminar on Utopias in Action in the South, held on October 18 and 19, 2018 at the UFSC Events Center, explored the connections between utopia and thought, political action, magic, art and subjectivity, in an interdisciplinary way and beyond. of Academy.
Sultopias involved discussions concerning the transformation of production, circulation and consumption patterns that characterize contemporary capitalism. Faced with the imminence of environmental and human catastrophe due to global warming, the use of natural resources for the production and destination of waste from the production process (including the goods themselves) are at the center of the reflection of social groups interested in preventing collapse. These problems add to the structural inequalities that characterize Brazilian society, such as income concentration and racial and gender discrimination.
At Sultopias, debate tables were combined with artistic performances and conversation circles. Academic intellectuals contributed with the contribution of contemporary perspectives on the concept of utopia and theoretical lines relevant to the formulation of a utopian epistemology (involving, in particular, postmodern and postcolonial currents of thought). Activists and artists complemented the debate with perspectives from their areas of expertise. Thus, the event contributed both to giving visibility to studies on utopia in Brazil, developed in several postgraduate programs in a non-articulated way, and to stimulating collective experiences of a utopian nature. The establishment of an interrelationship between academic knowledge, practical knowledge and experimentation, under mutual influence, stood out; and the consolidation of means of direct transformation of social reality.
The seminar was innovative for comparing theoretical-conceptual approaches and empirical experiences: it placed side by side, challenging epistemological hierarchies, different types of knowledge – religious, philosophical, scientific, empirical, abstract. Such opposition not only favored the learning of the large audience, but challenged the lecturers, inviting them to move from their usual places of speech. In academic terms, ten of the speakers came from Brazilian universities and presented original contributions to the debate.
In addition to Sultopias, the second edition of the event Floripa, Cidade Utopia, took place on October 20, bringing together more than 40 collectives and social movements from Florianópolis dedicated to building a better city/world. Together, the events had approximately 500 participants, including students and teachers of all levels of education, social activists and political activists, researchers, artists, communicators and other interested parties. The organization was funded by CNPq, as part of the 2018 National Science and Technology Week (SNCT) program.
Watch videos with part of the I Sultopias program:
Opening conference, “The undisciplined Utopia: the historicity of an extravagant idea”, with Henrique Estrada Rodrigues
Between 2017 and 2018, Luta held the Utopian Topics extension course at UFSC, in which radical pedagogies were explored to address topics such as love, magic, dream, death, among others.
Utopian Topics was an extension course at the Laboratório da Utopia, an action research project at UFSC aimed at strengthening and pollinating powerful ways of living and thinking. The creation of the course emerged from the sense of intellectual urgency for a radical reinvention of the ways of knowing crystallized by the modern standard; an insurgency of minds-bodies-affects eager to study by experimenting — experimentation being not a protocol to confirm a hypothesis, but constituting the knowable itself. In order to share and build the selected contents, each meeting had its unique configuration, planned by different people, from the basic agreement that there would always be at least one element besides a rational discussion via spoken language. Structure to destructure, to defect from the paradigm, to deterritorialize the logos, to experiment with the mixture, to fertilize thought and other senses.
The following general themes were dealt with, experimenting with the mixture between them, fertilizing reason with other meanings: anti-capitalism, affection, alterity, language, utopia, magic, destitution, time/death, dream, the hole of emotion, love. Each theme served as the axis of more or less canonized categories, from texts and sources belonging or not to the tradition of academic knowledge. Themes, tones, textures to burst what can become. Pores and neurons mutually implicated in a zone of collective discovery and invention. Free trial arena, no prescription and no precedent justification. The objective was to study and discuss themes and texts with inspired ideas to transform the world, and to do so in an unorthodox way, experimenting with different ways of teaching-learning.
Luta held the first edition of the “Introduction to utopia” mini-course in October 2020. With an 8-hour duration in four online modules, we deal with the concept and its contemporary approaches, with utopias in action in the world and in Floripa and the answers that utopian thinking can give life in/post-pandemic.
Soon we will have a version of the course for individual learning.
Action-research
By establishing connections with experiences of social transformation, Luta seeks to strengthen such initiatives and base them on academic research, as well as being inspired by them to transform academic practice. The change in things – in the world, in the social system, in the forms of production – is accompanied by a change in the way of thinking, feeling, knowing, and forming knowledge. Therefore, we question the conventional forms of the University and play with trying new forms: new theories, new methodologies, other understandings about the nature of things and knowledge. (Play is a way of learning.)
Theory and practice are not separated: when we observe social practices, we can observe the discourses, narratives, beliefs, knowledge that go along with them. In the case of emergent practices, what ways of knowing emerge together? What kind of utopian knowledge inspires and accompanies utopian experiences?
One of the premises that we seek to transform, for example, is: instead of thinking of a subject-researcher who investigates an object of study, we start from the idea that subject and object are inseparable: the world is all mixed up and research is a way of navigating this world. We can only know the world because we are part of it, not because we have an external and privileged view. This leads us to experiment and invent methodologies that are consistent with this perception. Some examples are social cartography, critical ethnography, the essay, the collective diary…
Another element of the utopian perspective: instead of investigating and detailing knowledge about what already exists, we seek to study the possibilities, what is being invented or what has been ignored or suffocated by common research. Academic research, particularly in the field of sociology, often focuses on describing the problems of today’s society – inequalities of class, race, gender, etc. Recognizing the urgency of such problems, we focus research on solutions! We observe social experiences that demonstrate possible directions for us to live better. Where are there positive examples of social equality, basic income, reproductive justice, solidarity cooperation? This is what interests us: to understand, strengthen and multiply positive social experiences.
