University Collectives and the Detachment Discourse away from the Parliamentary Politics ¹

Abstract

The first objective of this work is to present data and the discourse of university collectives. For such, sixteen qualitative interviews were carried out with all university collectives from the city of Teresina, state of Piauí, Brazil, as well as analyses of Facebook posts of 170 Brazilian university collectives. After critical analysis of these data, autonomy and novelty issues of these collectives were discussed, sometimes claimed by them, other times assigned to them by the literature. Empirical results show a discoursive distancing of collectives as regards parliamentary and party politics. For understanding such discourses, this work recalls data from Latinobarómetro on the trust in the Congress and political parties among Brazilian young students. In order to understand the increase of distrust in state politics, reflections were made on the consequences of neoliberal capitalism. These allow us to move forward in comprehending the discourses of young university students involved in political organizations, not losing sight of these positions as regards broader social and theoretical contexts.

Collectives; Social Movements; Youth; Political Participation