Poverty and citizenship in Brazil (1985-2015)

views from the relationship between labor and education

Abstract

 From the perspective of governmentality studies, this essay analyzes how citizenship and poverty are shaped in Brazil. We examine school education and labor market through the processes of change that Welfare State has been suffering during the past three decades. We aim to highlight the specificities of Brazilian processes of citizenship in order to understand how schooling, labor insertion and social integration were put to work together, with important effects to the processes of subjectification experienced by popular classes. We intend to show that neoliberal practices were important to social policies in Brazil in the sense that they allowed Brazilian State to reach a parcel of people – the working poor – that had always been under the line of citizenship. The sociological meanings of these phenomena are yet to be fully understood.