Michalis Kontopodis Boeken

The book investigates the impact of flexible short-term work contracts and inadequate social safety nets on educational paradigms that align with these economic conditions. It draws on empirical studies from Germany, the US, and Latin America, incorporating Vygotsky's theories to analyze how these pedagogies shape child development. Additionally, it explores alternative educational models from diverse contexts, including California and Brazil's landless peasant movement, highlighting potential solutions to the challenges posed by contemporary economic structures.

This book integrates historical anthropology and cultural-historical psychology to enhance understanding of child and youth development and education. It emphasizes communication, semiotic processes, and the role of artifacts in education, featuring contributions that explore innovative methodologies and the dynamic aspects of educational practices and child development.

A long history of poverty, discrimination, colonialism and struggle for social justice has provided, over the last fifty years, the context for the development of a vast amount of critical scholarship targeting marginalization in Brazil: Freireian pedagogics, theology of liberation, critical sociology, anthropology and ethnomathematics, critical social psychology and discourse analysis. Most of this scholarship has unfortunately been accessible only to the Portuguese-speaking readership. This volume presents, for the first time to an international audience, the novel understandings of critical research that have emerged in this frame. While Brazil is entering a new phase of socio-economic and political turmoil, distinguished representatives of the various critical research traditions from all over Brazil explore the voices and practices of those who are usually hardly heard: the helpless, the mentally ill, the landless, the homeless, the voiceless youth, delinquents, indigenous people, the powerless. The volume proposes original theoretical tools and arguments that can inspire social-scientific discussions on facing poverty and marginalization not only with regard to Brazil, but also other parts of the world. It is the first book of its kind in English and a unique tool for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and specialists across the social sciences.

This book is the result of a long movement of ideas and practices between Brazil and Germany. It brings together different research methodologies (discourse analysis, case studies, cross-cultural comparison, and action and practice- research) and studies innovative theoretical approaches and childhood-related practices that question present power relations and open up new ways of dealing with emerging phenomena in the fields of school and educational policy as well as in home-rearing, therapeutic, and community practices. A series of critical case-studies and examples of radically innovative educational, media and therapeutic practices and community-based interventions are presented, all of which demonstrate the transformative powers of collective subjectivities in the making of the history of childhood and youth and of society in general. The studies presented in this volume also illustrate the role cultural-historical and qualitative childhood research may play in this “making of history”. With an introduction by M. Kontopodis and chapters by: I. Behnken, M. Benites, F. Camerini, M. Damiani, B. Fichtner, F. Liberali, A. Lopes, M. Mascia, I. S. Soares, H. Winkler, and W. Wörster.

Seit Michel Foucault werden mit »Technologien des Selbst« Praktiken bezeichnet, mit denen die Menschen derart auf sich und ihre Lebensumstände einwirken, dass ihre Leben gewissen ästhetischen Vorstellungen zu entsprechen beginnen. Der Band beschäftigt sich mit diesen Transformationsprozessen und untersucht, wie in bestimmten Alltagspraxen Selbstkonzepte und damit assoziierte Praktiken immer wieder neu konfiguriert, in neue Beziehungen gesetzt und verändert werden. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widmen die ethnographischen Beiträge dabei der Rolle von Körper und Technologie.