Territories of schooling and schooling territories in contexts of extreme urban poverty in Argentina: Between management and abjection

Abstract

We are living in a time when large masses of workers have become large masses of the unemployed and, to borrow Butler's term, their bodies constitute an army of bodies that don't matter. This is probably one of the greatest dilemmas in our society, in the globalized world and in regions like Latin America in particular. In the framework of governmentality studies, this paper presents advances in research geared towards characterizing schooling practices in contexts of extreme urban poverty, specifically in an area on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with one of the highest concentrations of shantytowns. Starting in the late 1960s with the crisis in Fordism and the closing of factories, a dense population has come to inhabit these urban spaces in the midst of a process of extreme decay. I will focus, in this work, on the characteristics that I understand to distinguish the pedagogical devices and processes of subjectivation bound to the configuration of these abject territories.