Gender, class and religion in São Paulo's periphery: worker women's non-formal education as political learning

Abstract

The theme of this research is the religious informal education and the non-formal education of worker women living in São Paulo's periphery. The central hypothesis is that religiousness structures the perception and cognition of their class and gender social situation, blocking or enabling the political learning of women's rights. The theoretical framework adopted is the genetic structuralism, which allows to understand the cognitive structures' genesis and development; in the Sociology of Religion field, the two frames of this cognitive development are magic-monistic and ethical-dualistic worldviews. The qualitative empirical research will articulate three procedures: its core will be focus groups, with an ethnographic exploratory research and life stories as a complementary technique. The selected fields are São Paulo's Eastern Zone districts, due to its strong religious pluralism. The ethnography will seek: to map the associative life of women in this territory; to observe the religious field (magical and ethical sources); and to identify the concrete dilemmas experienced by worker women regarding their heteronomy and autonomy. The focus groups will be organized homogeneously from the religion's point of view and those dilemmas will serve as stimulus materials for their discussions; the debates' transcription will then be analyzed and coded in accordance with a genetic-structural approach. Finally, life stories from leaderships in the associative life of women (such as from worker women involved in grassroots movements and NGOs) will be collected to build from their experiences standards to assist the analysis of the experiences of women interviewed at the focus groups. (AU)