- “Pedagogical risk and governmentality: shanty towns in Argentina in the 21st. century

SILVIA GRINBERG

Queens College, Cambridge, UK.

Conferencia; SCARR Conference Risk & Rationalities; 2007

SCARR network, Social contexts and responsive to risk, Univeristy of Kent

In Latin America and in Argentina, the notion of risk is used to refer to the growing impoverished population. In this paper we present research carried out at the intersection of governmentality, pedagogical devices and the production of subjectivity in shantytowns. The notion of pedagogical risk is crucial to educational debate and planning, where the primary aim is for schools and their actors to measure and foresee levels of risk through quantitative and qualitative indicators. These actors are expected to make individual decisions and to effect changes in their behaviour. We propose that pedagogical risk management involves a new way to operate power, a new rationality and technology of “conduct of conduct,” characterized by an attempt to produce a sense of individual responsibility for achievements and failures. Hence, in school, young people are taught that poverty is a question of the self and individual responsibility.