This dissertation has the goal of understanding how students from an inner-city school in a poor community—a favela—construct, transform, and engage in their identity politics. It focuses on the economic, cultural, and political conditions of their lives. It analyzes students' identity politics as they constantly interact with gender, race, and class relations. It deals with students' lives in multiple sites: the school, home, and the community. This study examines the historical, cultural, and ideological contents of the formation of students' identities.
This research is based on a qualitative study in a municipal school in the city of Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, with one eighth grade class and one fifth grade class. Although the students are between 15 and 18 years of age, they have continued to stay in a primary/middle school. The findings of this study suggest that students actively construct identities that have contradictory class, gender, sexual, and racial effects and understandings. Students' social and cultural relations of reproduction as well as their acts of resistance indicate that students' different subject positions have to be understood first based on the material aspects of students' reality, articulating the discursive and material boundaries that circumscribe and influence the students' lives.
The analytical tools of this work are drawn from critical education studies including social, cultural, and resistance theories, neo-Marxist conceptions of ideology, poststructuralist approaches to discourse, and cultural and feminist understandings of identity politics. This research has major implications for how the concept of resistance is used. It shows that critical research must go beyond structuralist conceptions of social and cultural reproduction to connect with more nuanced models of identity politics, new social movements, and poststructuralist theories.
Using these new approaches enable us to see students' potential for social mobilization and the possibilities of the transformation of their reality. This can only be accomplished by combining research on the social interactions in school, the social relations at home, in the paid and unpaid workplace, and in the community.