Analyze

Favelas in RJ state are often located on hills, which served as refuge for enslaved people - after the abolition of slavery (1888) - and immigrants, who worked for downtown citizens. The Law of lands (1850) prevented unoccupied lands to be owned through labour and provided government subsidies for the arrival of foreign settlers to be hired in the country, further devaluing the work of black men and women. As a result, favelas today are mostly composed of a black population, surviving decades of persecutions and low incomes while defending, preserving and creating a unique culture rooted in African origins that reverberates into music and the arts. Children in favelas, due to social and economical inequality and racial discrimination, have less possibility of personal development and professional realization. They attend public schools where in 2021, according to SAEB, students do not reach a satisfactory level in Portuguese language (69%) and math (95%).

They hardly have access to after-school courses and do not tend to see themselves represented in the academic community. This produces a disadvantage in access to higher education and consequently in opportunities for decent employment. The project Closer to the Sky aims at co-producing scientific knowledge in collaboration between astronomers and artists/educators living in the favela of Cantagalo Pavão Pavdosinho (PPG, RJ, Brazil), for children, teenagers and young adults of the community. We will work in close collaboration with the social project Ninho das Aguias, where classes and night sky observations will be held.
Offering extracurricular courses and cultural experiences to students in the PPG, we wish to enrich their school curriculum and strengthen the chance they wish to stay in education after secondary school. A key element of the courses is providing positive role models of scientists from Afrodescendant backgrounds, reinforced by the presence of local artists and educators, thus endorsing their role within the academic community. The project also creates just work opportunities for local artists and educators, who will offer workshops rooted in favela culture, while at the same time creating novel, decolonial courseware based on contextualized science, i.e materials that use the context of marginalized societies as examples where we can understand, learn and make science. The material developed within the project will be shared as Open Educational Resources in several languages.

Barbosa Araujo, Claudio Alberto. 2023. "Closer to the Sky." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science, Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Sabina Vaught’s Compulsory challenges conventional understandings of state schooling through an ethnographic exploration of the juvenile prison school system in the United States. Vaught examines the ways in which juvenile prison and prison school are shaped by legal and ideological forces working across multiple state apparatuses. Vaught depicts these forces vividly through her ethnographic focus on Lincoln prison school, a site serving “as a window onto the massive institutional practices of juvenile schooling, knowledge production, and incarceration in the United States” (19). Her ethnography maps the network of relations converging through this site—between prisoners, teachers, state officials and mothers. In doing so, her ethnography captures an illustrative account of the institutional assemblages at work in constituting the state through material and ideological practices of dispossession and education of young Black men. She demonstrates the ways in which the state disproportionally displaces young Black men from home and subjects them to abuse, captivity, and forced submission through its educational apparatus.

 In her approach, Vaught highlights distinct spaces of interest: inside and outside the juvenile prison school system. She works with these designations to map institutional powers across different spaces, arguing that “Inside and Outside are places just as Seattle and Canada are proper nouns with distinct features, bounded space, governing rules, sociocultural symbology, and so on” (12). In mapping these spaces, Vaught is also attentive to who is present and who is absent, both discursively and materially. Absences are recognized as shaping the field in which Vaught is working—for instance, her ethnographic focus on young men in prison schools is largely an outcome of institutional practices of hiding young black women from view. In the logic of prison administrators, “girls were too vulnerable to be exposed to research” (17)—despite paradoxically deemed “dangerous” in justifying their captivity.

Vaught’s attention to absence is also explicit in her examination of removal, as a practice aimed at disrupting the private spheres of people of color through prisons and schools. Removal entails the physical relocation of students from their homes to schools, where “they are subject to meaningless or hostile captive educational performances” (321). Removal, as Vaught demonstrates, is essential to the continuous construction of the US as a White, heteropatriarchal nation.

More specifically, removal disables the possibility of a Black private sphere by disrupting kinship relations between young Black men and their families and making young Black men into prisoners. Removal acts as an assault “on Black women as custodians of the house of resistance, on Black boys as figments of White criminal imaginations who antithetically define White male innocence and citizenship, and on Black girls as both hyperaggressive and broken ghost victims” (321). The state works to supplant other social and family relations with carceral kinship relations, which normalize and legitimize the removal process. This process is further reinforced with the psychological manipulation of young men through state-imposed “treatment,” which corrodes their sense of free will and promotes feelings of internal, individual culpability for their exclusion from citizenship.

Vaught argues that this disruption of Black private spheres is significant because these are important spaces of resistance, in which counter publics are formed. In the United States, “the public” is leveraged as a tool of white supremacist control in limiting the power of some. Rights themselves are exclusive and private—limited to those possessing property, a condition of whiteness dependent on the exclusion of people of Color. Dispossession and education are practices that maintain and rationalize this exclusivity, as young Black men are denied the possibilities of citizenship. These practices serve to protect the interests of the White state, to which the potential emergence of private Black citizens (and their potential publics) act as threats: “White freedom, will, and fitness for self-governance exist only through the ideological and structural denial of those very things in Black people” (322).

In her attention to the interrelations between the white supremacist state, prison schooling, and critical scholarship, Vaught offers direction for activists and scholars invested in social justice and education—particularly in her critique of the school-to-prison pipeline, which draws attention to the limitations of reform. As an apparatus of the state, schools are meant to function as prison pipelines. Scholars and activists applying the prison-to-pipeline logic in advocating for education reform overlook this essential fact and “unintentionally confirm the principal, most damaging misconception of school: that it is good” (37). Vaught’s Compulsory supports and gives life to alternative theoretical approaches focused on the racist organization of schools in relation to prisons. In this, Vaught exemplifies her approach to theory as stewardship: theory is “a stewardship of a kinship network of meaning. It is not just an abstraction we take up and give life to page by page but rather a living force that in some ways takes us up” (41). Ultimately, Vaught’s theoretical stewardship offers meaningful direction for scholars and activists: “State schooling … is the beating heart of a supremacist state. … To take on the heart of the state requires further mapping its reaches” (323).

1. How has CRPE adapted its strategies and approaches in response to changes in the political and social landscape, and what are the organization's priorities for the future?

2. What advice would you give to individuals or organizations interested in working on environmental and social justice issues in low-income communities and communities of color, based on CRPE's experiences?

3. How does CRPE measure the impact of its work, and what data or metrics does the organization use to track progress?

4. Can you provide examples of some of CRPE's most significant successes in addressing environmental and social justice issues, and the strategies that were employed to achieve these successes?

This organization is based upon supporting grassroots movements with the necessary legal to represent and support local activists effectively. CRPE also consciously makes an effort to represent historically underrepresented and marginalized communities.

California Green Zones | (CRPE) wrote a piece regarding CRPE and spoke highly of this organization and its efforts to support underserved communities in the San Joaquin Valley.

Kern Community Foundation, Fresno County, and King Community Activists are groups from the local area that support and collaborate with CRPE.

Mainstream agricultural farming is conducted within this area. It produces an obscene amount of pollution that is toxic to the local community, but at the same time, the industry is a significant employer for the local area.

CRPE seems to be proud that they are working within the San Joaquin Valley in one of the most polluted areas in the nation, “West of the Mississippi.” It also claims that by empowering locals with the necessary resources, they can amplify the already “robust vision for change” as well as “the willpower [of the community] to make it happen.”

They share the cases they are actively working on and provide further details and documentation of how those legal battles proceed. I feel as if the information itself is credible because of the validity of the organization's purpose and then the team of active lawyers working on each case. 

CRPE seems most proactive around legal advocacy work. They support and represent the needs of the communities they work with to help them reach their goals.