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This chapter discusses how young Black people produce social agency through the sphere of culture, based on hip-hop. Divided into two parts, it surveys theses and dissertations produced in Brazilian universities on the subject in the last ten years. In a second moment, it proposes a research methodology that takes young people as narrators of their social experiences, emphasizing how they think about the school space. The work is an exploratory study and seeks the interposition between formal schooling and the cultural practices of hip-hoppers. It intends to affirm hip-hop as a power, an affirmative form of an ethic of life, a way of life, and a way of escaping the established places for poor, Black young people from the suburbs. It is also intended to show how hip-hop, a marginal culture, has triggered a game of cultural positions within the school and displaced provisions of power.

Background: The political participation of children and adolescents provided for in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Brazil’s Statute of the Child and Adolescent adopted in July 1990 has been proposed to ensure the effectiveness and guarantee of citizenship with regard to children and adolescents in adult-centered and adult-normative cultures.

Methods: This study aimed to understand the meaning of recognition in relation to the child as a subject of rights in the context of political participation in Brazil from 2001 to 2017 through the accounts of two adolescents who have been activists since childhood. The narratives were interpreted in light of the identity theory based on the critical social psychology and the sociology of childhood.

Results: This helped identify (1) the systemic unpreparedness when dealing with adolescents as persons who advocate for the civil rights of children and adolescents; (2) the attempts by education professionals to restrict adolescent activists to schools and family institutions to delegitimize them from their representative potential; and (3) that political participation could help raise the interviewed adolescents’ awareness of the power relations inherent in the social structure.

Conclusions: The effectiveness of political participation is considered a challenge, regardless of official documents being made use of, given the need for a paradigm shift with regard to the universalist theories that consider the institution of childhood exclusively as a progressive preparation for the adult world.

This study aims at presenting the results of the research on the formative and permanent education in adolescence for health professionals of the Municipality of São Paulo. The analysis focuses on the so-called permanent education geared toward health professionals, and seeks to learn about the relation between biomedicine’s construction “of” adolescence and the problems related to teenagers’ health, deemed fundamental for the training of health professionals, from the study of themes related to teenagers’ health as they feature in the Permanent Education Municipal Plans (Planos Municipais de Educação Permanente – PLAMEP, covering the whole of the municipality). Thus the aim is to problematize the social construction, by biomedicine, of adolescence and of the adolescent body, grounded on the understanding of the issues raised in the PLAMEPs and defined as proper “to” adolescence and important for the permanent formation of health professionals. With a methodological approach of both quantitative and qualitative characters, the study holds as empirical reference the Municipal Health Schools of the Municipality of São Paulo and the six Regional Coordination Offices. The study relies, as research techniques, on documental survey (the PLAMEPs); on semi-structured interviews with managers, health representatives, and professionals to whom the activities of permanent education are aimed at; and on notes from the field book. The results now presented refer to the phase of PLAMEPs’ collection and analysis.

This research aimed to analyze the interactions of “pre-adolescent” students in the classroom through relationships sustained by structure, agency, and power exercises based on Anthony Giddens’ Theory of Structuring.¹ A qualitative research approach was used with the characteristic of a case study in a municipal public school in the city of Itabira (MG), Brazil. As procedures for recording the evidence, we used the application of a questionnaire, observation of the classroom and listening to students and teachers in a class of the sixth year of elementary school II during the 2017 school year. The results indicated that the vision of “pre-adolescence” marked by biological and psychological changes remains institutionalized for school professionals. The students demonstrated the need for the teacher to use his teaching authority to set limits in the classroom, however, this exercise of agency-power by the teacher must be negotiated and mediated by the participation of “pre-adolescents.” In view of this procedural context, “pre-adolescent” students cannot be held responsible for the instability of the interactive process in the classroom if the historical and social context through which these students pass is not considered in comparison to the institutionalized characteristics solidified through the process, time, and space by the school and/or some of its representatives (teachers).

The chapter discusses an articulation detected in the Ursula School between the discipline/indiscipline logic (Rodrigues, 2007) and the contemporary cultural tone in which to be is to be perceived, be seen (Türcke, 2010), experienced by Brazilian adolescents. The pursuit of being seen/perceived was persistent in the statements of the students who participated in the research. An ethnographic perspective guided the methodology of the research. The text aims to describe articulations present in the Ursula School, the empirical locus of the investigation. The empirical data of the paper are presented through ethnographic discussions. The ethnography found students eager to be seen/perceived by their peers and/or school professionals. It reinforces the pleasure/power spirals (Foucault, 2012) contained in disciplining, being disciplined, or being undisciplined. At the same time, it highlights a game between seeing and being seen (Bhabha, 2004). Nevertheless, students’ behavior was ambivalent, as some ethnographic data show. The articulations described in the chapter enable us to discuss how adolescents have recently experienced school. As well as this chapter allows sociological considerations about a school that remains a pivotal institution in the lives of adolescents, but is traversed by externals logics, mainly derived from industrialized cultural elements. The Türcke (2010) assertion will be explored through a new question. Be is to be perceived and seen by who, and in which context?

Established in 1967 by the National Service (Amendment) Bill, National Service (NS) makes it compulsory for most young Singaporean males to enlist in the armed forces, typically for a two-year period. NS comes at a critical juncture in most Singaporean mens’ adolescence, disrupting their lives and isolating them in a foreign environment just as they are beginning to form a firm sense of identity. Recruits are expected to go through grueling training and endure harsh scoldings to prove their worth as both soldiers and men. Through an interview with 14 individuals who have served or are serving NS, it is found that the hegemonic masculinity present in NS relies on norms of strength, leadership, and suppression of emotion. However, its impact on enlistees is inconsistent, and dependent on one’s vocation, personal encounters, and expectations prior to enlisting.