‘Left to Themselves’: contemporary scenes of adolescence

Abstract

In her work The Crisis of Education (1954), Hannah Arendt already raised the need to reflect on the authority of the adult and the place of adolescents left to themselves. The text that we propose tries to outline, between two shores, Brazil and Spain, the words, the acts and the staging of adolescents confined to our cities. The objective is to be able to formulate new questions, in times of excessive responses, about dropouts, protection, the absence and presence of the adult in adolescent lives, the role of public education and clinical care. To do this, we try, as part of an ongoing investigation, to give the floor to adolescents in different social situations.