Schooling and Desiring Production in Contexts of Extreme Urban Poverty. Everyday Banality in a Documentary by Students: Between the Trivial and the Extreme

GRINBERG, SILVIA

Londres

Conferencia; Gender and Education Association 7th International ConferenceTheme: Gender: Regulation and Resistance in Education; 2009

University of London, Institue of education

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:ES-AR;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> In this paper, I offer some reflections on a video documentary workshop for students in the first year of middle school. The workshop, which was held in 2008, took place in a school in an area of extreme urban poverty. The students were asked to conceive of, produce and film a documentary video. The only restriction was that the project be about their daily life and not be fictional, because the project was constructed as an opportunity to create, in the context of the school, spaces for thinking about and problematizing the world. The workshop itself and its product –a documentary about trash and waste in the neighborhood– confront us with something that we all know but have difficulty proving: none of the material conditions of existence can be isolated from ways of operating or, significantly, from desire and the will to live. Doing is always constituted in certain conditions of existence and, returning to Deleuze and Guattari, desires is always close to those conditions. This experience of doing entails the life of subjects, the dynamics of school life but also – and here I am going to speak of what these young people made, in which they express their interests, concerns, desires and aspirations– political statements insofar as an affirmation of life and the flows of desire.