Abstract
Concerned with the experience of Antônio Carlos Gomes da Costa who, at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil, implemented an innovative idea of educational assistance to court-involved youth, we recall his account of this experience in Minas Gerais and compare it to the process of recent constitution of the work category of social educators in Ceará/Brazil. Thus, our idea is to make a comparative analysis of the affective dynamics of the two experiences. In light of Spinoza's theory of affects, associated with Norbert Elias’ figurational sociology, we postulate that in the most recent experience fear and shame abound, while in the previous case recognition and approval prevail in relation to the occupation currently called social educator. Finally, we identified the paradigmatic poles in the configuration of this category of work at different times and found that the polarity is reproduced in the two experiences with an alternation of position and form in the disputes between an authoritarian paradigm and another democratic institutional one.
Keywords
socio-educational system; social educators; theory of the affects; figurational sociology