#OcupaEscola: Media Activism and the Movement for Public Education in Brazil

Abstract

This article draws a big picture of the social movement that hit Brazil in 2015 and 2016 when hundreds of public schools were occupied by students in opposition to State and National levels educational reforms. Following same trend seen on other popular demonstrations in the 2000s, the Brazilian Ocupa Escola movement was geographically and chronologically distributed though not necessarily fragmented. In this chapter, the authors analyse the movement’s presence on Facebook and Youtube with a cross-method approach which correlates video-activism narratives and a network analysis. More than finding answers to explain the impressive reach of the Ocupa Escola movement in Brazil, this chapter aims at exploring methods to investigate this kind of social phenomena by mixing classical concepts on the Social Movements Theory, Communications Studies, digital methods and the rising idea of Technopolitics.