Adolescências em privação de liberdade e projetos de vida (em) possibilidades

Abstract

This research aimed to understand whether and how institutional perezhivaniya contribute to the (re)construction of adolescents’ life projects and to their prospects for social reintegration in cases of repeated placements within the closed juvenile socioeducational system. The study is grounded in historical-dialectical materialism and cultural-historical psychology, taking perezhivanie as the unit of analysis of the relationship between the individual and the social environment and understanding adolescence as constituted through historical, cultural, and social conditions. It starts from a critique of individualizing interpretations of repeated involvement in the socioeducational system, which are often attributed to adolescents’ choices or personal characteristics, in order to examine how institutional perezhivaniya contribute to adolescents’ conscientization and to the (re)construction of their life projects under conditions of repeated placement. The qualitative study was conducted at a Socioeducational Care Center of Fundação CASA, a state institution responsible for the care of adolescents experiencing repeated placements. Twelve adolescents participated in the study, selected according to the criteria of repeated placements and availability to participate. Access to participants occurred through the institution’s initial indication of potential participants, followed by individual invitations and the adolescents’ voluntary consent to participate; thus, the institutional indication served as the condition through which access to potential research participants was made possible. The study adopted action research as its methodological approach, combining focus groups, workshops, and individual conversations, totaling 12 sessions. In the workshops, escrevivência was used as a mediating resource and as a form of expression and production of meanings concerning the adolescents’ trajectories, institutional perezhivaniya, and future prospects. The data were analyzed through the Signification Nuclei approach (Aguiar & Ozella, 2013), seeking to apprehend the meanings produced by the adolescents and the concrete conditions in which their perezhivaniya are constituted. The findings show that the adolescents’ trajectories are marked by affective deprivation, weakened social bonds, sociocultural impoverishment, and recurrent restrictions and violations of rights—processes that precede placement and continue to shape and generate tensions within their institutional experiences. The findings also demonstrate that custodial socioeducational measures constitute a contradictory totality in which practices of control, regulation, and individual accountability coexist and come into tension with possibilities for guaranteeing rights, human development, the production of meanings, and the projection of future possibilities. Institutional perezhivaniya do not produce homogeneous effects. Rather, they constitute mediations through which social and institutional contradictions are refracted and given meaning by adolescents, potentially expanding possibilities for conscientization and future projection while simultaneously reproducing mechanisms that constrain such possibilities. Thus, this thesis argues that understanding repeated involvement in the socioeducational system requires moving beyond the exclusive attribution of responsibility to adolescents and apprehending the social, historical, and institutional determinations that shape their trajectories and the concrete conditions under which future possibilities are constructed. In this sense, the custodial socioeducational measure investigated in this study emerges as a contradictory space in which mediations with emancipatory potential coexist and come into tension with mechanisms of control and regulation, the reproduction of inequalities, and individual accountability.