This paper presents de research project Commoning Education: Lessons from Latin American Popular Education in Buenos Aires – Argentina (EduCommon), financed by the European Comission (Call MSCA-IF-2020), that will be developed between 2022 and 2025.

Rethinking education as ‘a commons’ is a current line of enquire (Collet & Grinberg, in press) among researchers interested on reverse the corporate and privatised views of education that became dominant in the 1990s along with the expansion of neoliberalism. In the European context, this Commons Paradigm (CP) have activated lively academic and social debate in the face of discontent with the state’s management of the 2008 crisis through privatisation and austerity policies (Laval & Dardot, 2019). Even UNESCO (2015) has promoted rethinking education as a common good, and frames education in these terms in its late report (UNESCO, 2021). Within this ample debate around the commons, it is worthy to highlight the Marxist work of Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis, that in the 1970s started to denounce the new and ongoing processes of enclosures of capitalism around the world (Midnight Notes, 1990). These new enclosures are the processes by which natural, social, and cultural commons, including public-state services, such as public education, are captured by economic interests in its commodified form (Federici & Caffentzis, 2015).

In the field of education, this enclosure includes measures such as: managerial governance of education, a narrow conception of education based on human capital, and academic curricula geared toward market interests. As a constructive response to this panorama, literature based on CP enquires how to build a common education, that is, equitable, decolonial, anti-racist, feminist and democratic (Means, Ford & Slater, 2017). However, whilst in other areas CP has elaborated on a close dialogue between theoretical reflection and political-social experiences, to date few educational research projects have connected both aspects in the field of education. To fil this gap, the main aim of EduCommon is to set up an intercultural translation (Sousa Santos, 2016) between CP and current experiences of Popular Education (PE). More specifically, this project will foreground the experiences of Bachilleratos Populares (BP) that emerged in Buenos Aires after 2001 crisis.

Organised by grassroots social organisations to promote youth literacy for those without qualifications in compulsory education, BPs provide access to education where the state has failed to do so (Wahren, 2020). Some of these BPs have subsequently sought state recognition of their courses. The PBs are one of the most relevant experiences of PE, given their high social presence and their long duration over time: the first BPs started their activity in 2004 and the number of BPs grew extensively between 2008 and 2011 with 65 new BPs in this period (GEMSEP, 2015). Their experience reveals the complex relations between grassroots organisations and the state over almost two decades: a relationship marked by the tension between gaining state recognition and maintaining their autonomy of action (Wahren, 2020).

This proposal emerges from the observation of the common points of both CP and PE trends: (i) they focus on social spaces that are neither public —understanding ‘the public’ as the state— nor private —understanding ‘the private’ as the market—, rather, they are transformative attempts that involve the active; (ii) they draw on models of grassroots democracy that go beyond the liberal-capitalist model of democracy; (iii) they focus on equality, and (iv) explore points of intersection between the ‘public-state’ and ‘the commons’, understood as grassroots democratic practices occurring at the community-local level.

Method section: project design. EduCommon is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of education studies (areas of theory of education, educational policy, and sociology of education) and political studies (areas of political theory, public policy, and social movements). BP experiences in Buenos Aires have been investigated from sociology and social movement studies, whilst educational policy studies tend to focus on the approach of public policies promoted by the state. The main theoretical pillar of this project is the epistemologies of the South, which is defined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as ‘the ways of knowing from the perspectives of those who have systematically suffered the injustices, dominations and oppressions caused by colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy’ (Santos, 2016, 18). Drawing on this approach, Santos proposes intercultural translation as a methodological route for research: ‘Intercultural translation consists in searching for isomorphic concerns and underlying assumptions among cultures, identifying differences and similarities, and developing, whenever appropriate, new hybrid forms of cultural understanding and intercommunication that may be useful in favouring interactions and strengthening alliances among social movements fighting, in different cultural contexts, against capitalism, colonialism, and sexism, and for social justice, human dignity, or human decency’ (Santos, 2016, 22). Drawing on epistemologies of the South, the first step of EduCommon is to develop an ‘analysis grid’ linking CP and PE discourses. Deploying genealogical-discourse methods (Hattge, Klaus & Lockmann, 2014), we will identify their convergences in three key dimensions through a literature review: (H) Historical: to better contextualise their origins, we will explore the roots of both discourses and their emergence in crisis scenarios. (I) Institutional: institutional governance they both establish and propose, focusing on the intersection between ‘the public-state’ and ‘the commons’ (grassroot democracy promoted by social actors). (PP): Political-Pedagogical: their conceptions of education, politics, democracy, and citizenship, which will provide a comprehensive understanding of their political intent, emancipatory character, and their contributions to enhancing democracy. Based on this analysis, the second step is to develop empirical research through original qualitative data about current PE experiences in Buenos Aires generated through conversational interviews with key stakeholders and complementary public data available online. Finally, the third step will be to provide analytical knowledge on the opportunities for an intercultural translation between PE experiences and European discourses and practices that foster education as a common good with the goal of strengthening the democratic governance of public schooling.

Following the epistemologies of the South, EduCommon will produce knowledge in the field of education through a South-North intercultural dialogue between Latin America and Europe.). This project will deploy an innovative approach by integrating the knowledge of both areas (education studies and political studies) and considering the action of the state and of social actors in an integrated manner. In this sense, it will provide contextualised analytical knowledge, so far scarce, on the intersections between ‘the common’ (local-community based dimension) and ‘the public’ (state dimension) in education, which is a key axis of inquiry within the CP.

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