An everyday life outside of the everyday life: experiences of time and community life in an occupied high school in Rio de Janeiro

It is quite uncommon for a social movement to fill up the participants’ everyday life almost entirely. It was the case for the student movements in Brazil that erupted in 2015 and 2016, leading to a hitherto unprecedented type of action: the occupation by the students, night and day, of high schools and their being turned into hotspots where the mobilization, living and alternative educational activities were organized. As a result, the mobilization gave birth to a community everyday life, which the actors arranged and invented from scratch, breaking away from their school routine to implement a new one. Based on ethnographic material collected over the course of the two months spent in taking part in one occupation, I endeavour to explore what the everyday life of a high school occupation consists in: how it is experienced and how the occupants produce it, resorting to organizational bricolage seeking to articulate the necessities of proper collective functioning with those of utopian projection – since what was at stake was also designing the school (and the society) the students were envisioning.