Favelas and Popular Education News Agency: Youths between inequality and protagonism
Popular education, community communication, inequality and protagonism.
In this work, the institution Agência de Notícias das Favelas (ANF) as a popular education and public policy mechanism is the focus. In the work in question, I analyze the extermination of youth in Rio's favelas and read the 2014 Map of Violence: Young people in Brazil - which provides an overview of the evolution of violence against young people between 1980 and 2012 - identifying the locations and determinants violence in the short, medium and long terms. According to the Map of Violence, the biggest victims of homicides in Brazil are young men and blacks, mostly poor people, slum dwellers and with very little education. Meanwhile, the mainstream media discourse portrays black, poor and peripheral youth as delinquents, suspects and producers of violence. The criminalization of poverty is an inheritance of the roots of Brazilian slavery and the hegemonic media discourse has great responsibility in this, since it contributes significantly to the production of subjectivities as a social phenomenon, hierarchizing relationships and transforming, through structural racism, into a suspect all that who is black and poor. Exterminated youth are also criminalized, classified as delinquents and ignored in all their potential as a producer of art and culture by the mainstream media. Concomitantly, however, there is the newspaper A voz da Favela, one of the media outlets of the Favelas News Agency, which reports - also through its internet portal and social networks - the events of / in the favela from another angle, presenting the youth of the periphery as a producer: not of violence, but of art. Thus, this work will analyze the contents of the Map of Violence, problematize the effects of subjectivity production on the subjects, but, mainly, focus on how the ANF works as a popular education in the daily lives of countless people who write for the newspaper as well as that. they read, having access to news from the favelas and the construction of this vision in a non-criminal, but democratic, popular way, functioning as public policy. The selection of what is disclosed also reveals a subjectivity. The Favelas News Agency works as a vehicle for democratic communication, publicizing youths from the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro as a power they are, giving visibility to what these young culture producers are able to do in a diverse and plural way, thus showing the practice popular education, which is beyond the school walls. The ANF emerges precisely as an option for popular education in this scenario of criminalization of peripheral youths as it gives them a voice - who also start to report on the daily life of the favelas - and at the same time they read what favelas are without being hegemonic. The theoretical framework adopted was the perceptions of authors from Education such as Brandão and Freire, and Philosophy as Foucault and Mbembe.