Associate Fellow
Hugo Fanton is a postdoctoral fellow at the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP), an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Citizenship Rights (CENEDIC-USP) and at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institut Uni-Freiburg. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the State University of Campinas (IFCH/Unicamp), with post-doctoral concluded in the Department of Political Science at USP. He develops research in the areas: Social Movements; Democracy; Authoritarianism; Class Conflicts; Business Political Behaviour; Neoliberalism; Ideology; Public Policies; Urban Issues; and Social Participation. He is also state coordinator of the Central de Movimentos Populares de São Paulo, an organisation that brings together several urban popular movements, such as the housing, health and women's rights movements, and which aims to articulate the movements for general struggles in defence of democracy, rights, public policies and social participation. As a member of IRGAC, he develops research on “Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Brazil: ideological disputes and class conflicts”. The project aims to analyse the ideological dimension of the conflicts involving different class fractions in Brazil, correlating political, economic, social and environmental aspects with the disputes of values and worldviews in society and in state-society interaction. The central hypothesis is that the ideological disputes present in everyday life and involving different social forces and class fractions are crucial to the understanding of the multidimensional crisis and its political consequences. The project proposes an investigation of the worldviews and political behaviour of dominant and subaltern classes in Brazil, with empirical research involving literature review, document analysis, interviews and ethnographic study. This material will ground the analysis of the subjective and ideological dimension of Authoritarian Neoliberalism, interrelating the concepts of neoliberal subject, the mentality and thought that constitute bourgeois society as a global phenomenon and the specificity of Brazilian socio-political thought on democracy as an unfinished project.
