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This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a 'circle of culture'. It delves into how popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power, narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the Emancipa movement in their pursuit of democratizing Brazilian universities. The discussion is set within the context of Latin American structural inequalities and the issue of educational exclusion in Brazil. It emphasizes the vital role of contesting culture and knowledge as part of the movement's fight against social injustices perpetuated by peripheral capitalism, including racist violence and gender oppression. The paper adopts emancipatory pedagogy as the method to empower and mobilize grassroots efforts in this transformative endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a debate anchored in a dialogue between concepts of insurgent planning and humane urbanism and the idea of a subaltern urbanism through the lens of a critical reflection on the role of city-building professionals. The paper explores the idea of an insurgent urbanism as a collaborative praxis of city design and development that arises from the protagonism of marginalised communities and the accumulative knowledge of social movements, activists and scholars. It focuses on three different learning dimensions based on the experience of teaching/research actions developed at a self-organised squat in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 2018 and 2022. Dialoguing with ideas of social learning, it shows that these practices have created a relevant exchange of different types of knowledge and have contributed to the development of other solutions that challenge the hegemonic and neoliberal city production and can therefore be seen as alternatives for the development of more egalitarian and imaginative futures that expand beyond the context of squats in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 2015–2016, high school students in Brazil occupied hundreds of schools across the country. Students fought to keep public schools open, funded, and functional, against outsourcing and privatisation, and in solidarity with teachers' trade unions and strikes. The 'primavera secundarista' ('student spring') was the most significant school student movement since the struggles against the military dictatorship (1964–1988). This paper firstly addresses the political dynamics of the primavera secundarista. Secondly, it discusses the movement's educational practices, which flourished in the months that students occupied their schools. Thirdly, it discusses the forms of community and solidarity that students built with other social actors and how they each learnt from this. In doing so, the paper builds on the work of Aziz Choudry and other scholars of social movement learning to argue that such student movements are prime sites of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and dissemination. Shown through the Brazilian high school occupations, the paper highlights how student movements are unusual in being situated in formal epistemic institutions, and yet are not widely recognised, especially in high schools, as blending formal and informal learning to produce and share knowledge-from-below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]