ustice, Culture and Subjectivity: juridical technologies and the formation of new social sensibilities in Brazil

Abstract

Through the ethnographic study of the processes of children rights reform and the study of the restorative justice, I aim to comprehend some aspects of childhood and adolescence governance in Brazil. I suggest that these intervention approaches can be seen through two linked processes: on the one hand the emphases on the rhetoric of rights as instruments of modernization and social development. On the other hand the attempt to create “modern sensibilities” and new kinds of personhood in which the values of individuality, autonomy and self-responsibility are stressed. My interest is to understand how these new technologies of self-construction are related with diverse moralities and with other technologies of social intervention, making more complex unilateral assumptions on modernity, rights and processes of democratization.