Next, we present a look at the present as a context for interpretation that justifies our participation and presence in the CLACSO Working Group we are discussing. From an epochal perspective of crisis, we will focus on two of the most far-reaching problems for our Working Group, which, as we have been saying, is linked to different dimensions of reality—political, economic, cultural, and environmental, for example. On the one hand, there is the far right, which, in most Latin American and Caribbean countries, is waging what has been called a "cultural battle"—dramatic examples of this being Argentina and El Salvador. Undoubtedly, this so-called "cultural battle" is and has been one of the seven horsemen of the apocalypse for our countries.

This cultural battle permeates our entire lives through, and fundamentally, digital technology (Sadin, 2020b)—social media—as well as the mass media operating and acting within the symbolic world, practices, relationships, and socio-cultural representations, disrupting community values ​​and meanings. It is well known that common sense (Gramsci, 1973), as a construct of the dominant class, contains within itself disparate and even contradictory elements, but which, legitimized by the mainstream media and reinforced by the conscious and deliberate use of social networks, have the power to be assimilated as true and stripped of intentionality. Thus, within "common sense" coexist expressions that are the result of the experience of domination in all its dimensions and, also, germinal expressions of its overcoming, of a worldview capable of expressing the needs, experiences, and perspectives of subordinate sectors.

The other major problem is education in general, and in particular what we call established educational systems, caught between the struggle for the dissolution of the state and, consequently, of public education, with an ever-increasing trend toward privatization and the continued technologization, now through platforms that are pushing homeschooling and a strong trend toward distance education via virtual means and artificial intelligence (Sadin, 2020a), even more so since the global spread of COVID-19 (Schwab and Malleret, 2020). Educational privatization is based on the premise that everything done in the private and commercial sphere is more efficient and of higher quality than what is done in the state sphere. A fundamental task in the ideological dispute is to recover the emancipatory meaning of fundamental concepts such as education, and in that sense, the struggle is also for the defense of the public school, assuming its nineteenth-century and positivist logic, its old structure (regulated by the time of industry) to adapt it to the new realities and transform it into a meaningful space, full of meaning, for teachers, for students and for the community.

In this worldview, popular education (hereafter, EPs) and critical pedagogies (hereafter, PCs) will also have to be reconfigured. To whom will they be directed in this dissolution of the reference point of a modern contract in crisis? What should their spheres of influence and subjects of work be, considering the mass impoverishment of the working and middle classes?

These two major problems undoubtedly ride on the presence of technofeudalism (Varoufakis, 2023) and new forms of intervention in the configuration of social subjectivities in the face of hyperinformation that results in diluted subjects without clear references to values ​​and principles, as well as highly exposed to precariousness of all kinds, not only economic but, and fundamentally, emotional and mental health.

- How do critical pedagogies and popular education position themselves in relation to these present-day features?

- How to re-semanticize the guiding principles of an emancipatory social project?

- What can be done in the face of subjectivities that have been manipulated to consolidate a neoliberal subject?

- How can we foster the empowerment of critical thinkers? What are our current forms of liberating action? And liberating from what? What oppresses us today?

A third characteristic of our time is the fragmentation of the popular movement and the difficulties in overcoming this fragmentation to forge a unifying project. The challenges of social mobilization, made evident by the pandemic, are compounded by its subjective effects on individuals, leading to greater social immobility, apathy, and even uncertainty about the future. In this context, popular education and critical pedagogies can contribute to consolidating emerging projects in local communities, fostering improved living conditions and shaping alternative subjectivities that break the immobility and apathy characteristic of our times. Furthermore, exploring how common sense is formed, as well as its contradictions and disparate elements, through popular education and critical pedagogies, can help express the genuine interests of marginalized groups, enabling them to synthesize their own worldview. Political education and the development of educational alternatives are fundamental steps to return to individuals what has been taken from them.

A fourth feature, according to the questioning of Bárcena, Larrosa and Mélich (2006), is the existence of a democratic totalitarianism, which is present "so often" in our decisions, positions and actions, and against which we have to fight to uninstall it.

We define the context by grounding it in the ethical and political concerns that permeate our educational experience. As Paulo Freire suggests, "Reading the world, reading the word," it becomes crucial to ask ourselves: In what world are we educating? For what world are we educating? What expressions violate our dignity? What can we do in the face of so much suffering caused by hunger, contempt, and lives of sadness and misery? What am I responsible for?

These questions allow us to unveil and denounce the most terrible and devastating effects of hatred, exclusion, rampant consumerism, the exacerbation of individualism, and ethical relativism. These are characteristics of a capitalism that functions as an affective regime (Quintana, 2023) across the four dimensions of sensibility: bodily, psychic, ethical, and aesthetic. Added to this situational landscape is the production of fragmented, broken, and broken bodies. Therefore, this context urgently demands that we regulate discourses of enmity and their transmission to others, so that we can dismantle segregative practices, eliminate the criminalization, stigmatization, and marginalization of our contemporaries, and halt the production of expressions of cruelty.

In terms of the possibilities that arise in this context, we propose the activation of pedagogical projects that can be implemented to train these new generations of teachers, young people, children, and community educators. This training is structured around a field of understanding of educational policies, the ecology of knowledge, care practices, working with memory, embodiment, and the construction of an ethics of the senses, all developed within community, union, and community education spaces.

Thinking about a Working Group linked to the Social Sciences in Latin America necessarily involves reflecting on some questions such as:

- What would be the purpose of this Working Group within the framework of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences?

- Why would your contributions be necessary, and what contributions would we be able to donate to the CLACSO group?

- What are your core areas of work? What do you focus on in terms of knowledge production?

We believe that these, among other questions, are necessary in the presentation of this project experienced not only as a space that convenes and articulates the GT but also as an argument for its own existence and meaning in CLACSO.

It is from this perspective that we seek to share some reflections on what is assumed to be popular educations (hereinafter, EPs) and critical pedagogies (hereinafter, PCs) in order to then outline the scope of possibilities and horizon of work of the GT Popular Education and Critical Pedagogies as a community of critical thought and practices consistent with that thinking both micrologically and communally, understanding that these are today fundamental spaces of action for an emancipatory project that seeks to reappropriate intersubjective processes of sociocultural transformation both materially and symbolically.

Thus, for the purposes of this nomination, it is necessary to understand Popular Communities (PCs) as a set of practices and processes that facilitate and attempt to articulate collectives and organizations, guided by this emancipatory option as an ethical and political project. This has been closely related to the dynamics of social and political processes within the popular sphere and its political practices, particularly with the struggles and organizations that comprise it. In this sense, it is worth remembering that, as a movement, its agendas generally do not depend on the governments in power, but it cannot be indifferent to the scope and possibilities that this conjuncture may offer.

The Popular Education Movements (PEs) and the Popular Communities (PCs) are grounded in theoretical reflection, political mobilization, and the revitalization of expressions of resistance. They are also territorially grounded in their decisive support of the peasant, feminist, and environmental movements, popular sectors, student collectives, and teachers in the struggle for human rights and the right to education, which allows us to embrace the collective aspiration for social equality and political freedom. A special dimension is the formation of powerful, transgressive subjectivities and sensibilities situated within specific conditions of class, race, gender, and generation, and the configuration of epistemologies anchored in a dialogue of knowledges.

Work objective. Epistemic-methodological challenges

Continuing with what has been discussed, one of the great epistemic-methodological challenges in the construction of historical knowledge is to read the present in its emergences, its problematic symptoms, its absences, in its different orders and levels and perspective of totality, which would allow us to give answers with greater socio-historical and cultural relevance.

It is therefore possible to delve deeper into the reading of the present in its historical and cultural complexity (Zemelman, 2001) in order to decode those necessary turning points for responses that contribute to the recreation of an instituting semantics from an emancipatory project and program. At the same time, it is necessary to codify possible combative concepts and categories, as Ernest Bloch (2004) aptly points out, and thus be able to confront the current policies and logics of cruelty prevailing in our Latin American and Caribbean societies.

Objective:

- To delve deeper into the reading of the present in its historical and cultural complexity (Zemelman, 2001, 2011) in order to decode those necessary turning points of responses to contribute to the recreation of an instituting semantics from an emancipatory project and program, while at the same time encoding possible combative concepts and categories, as Ernest Bloch tells us in "The Principle of Hope" (2004), and thus be able to confront the current policies and logics of cruelty prevailing in our Latin American and Caribbean societies

From this objective, as a problematic knot, three organizing devices of the problematic field will be opened, ordered in questions and axes of analysis that will open the density of this challenging methodological device.

The questions of this methodological device have to do with what is the place of popular educations and critical pedagogies in the present and in this conjuncture, as characterized in the previous points.

Methodological devices of the problematic field:

1. The problematic symptoms of current reality. What is the characterization of the present? What is the interpretation of this historical moment? What new features appear in these configurations? What categories are no longer sufficient to explain the emergencies of our times? What is the potential of this present?

2. The question of the popular subject. What is the subject that is developing in the present time? What is happening to their subjectivities? Who is the subject of popular education, whom are they addressing with their discourses? What are their values ​​and motivations for acting?

3. The construction of a historical project. What are the new utopias? What is the utopian project—subjective and collective—of the left today? With what categories will we name the world we want it to be?

Areas of work and analysis

1. To promote situated work around EPs and/or PCs, from different areas, actors and with different institutional insertions and community social spaces, popular organizations, public schools, unions, universities, among others, or that they become a topic of priority interest for those who wish to become involved, or want to continue being part of.

2. To enable collective constructions that facilitate encounters with others and open ourselves to joint construction around the themes, problematic areas, and questions that concern us as a working group. Thus, it has been collectively decided that the GT's logo will not be used for individual matters, but rather for the actions and activities that we define to sustain, support, or strengthen as a working group.

3. To subscribe to the CLACSO project, as a center for reflection on the social sciences, education, pedagogy and consequently from and for critical thinking, from a non-dogmatic but critical position, contributing from a constructive place to the debate around what unites us.

4. To foster intergenerational exchange as a support for processes and as a dialogue of knowledge. This should be a criterion to consider when evaluating applications for affiliation.

5. Make commitments, which means being co-involved in the decisions and the implementation of the tasks and agendas that may be established. Recognizing that there may be different forms of participation, the proposal is that those who join can guarantee their presence at the monthly meetings held virtually, as well as participate in the various working groups and collective discussions that are defined. Contribute to the production of interdisciplinary knowledge and to leading initiatives aimed at positioning and sustaining the Working Group.

6. It is important to anchor the group's work in self-care and collective care, based on a democratic approach to conflict resolution, because care in educational and organizational spaces sustains, revitalizes, repairs, protects, attends to, shelters, contains, and embraces the different forms of life that we need for the sustainability of the GT.