Formative experiences and modes of political participation

Between militancy and work practices in a cooperative in the city of Rosario, Argentina

Abstract

This article addresses the organizational experience of a production and consumption cooperative in the city of Rosario, focusing on the contextual dimensions that shaped and permeated this initiative, as well as the confluence of subjects with diverse life trajectories and formative experiences. In this process, we analyze how the conformation of this space and the implementation of different entrepreneurships became at the same time an economic practice and a form of activism, where work and politics were articulated in a tense, conflictive and, at times, contradictory way. In this way we seek to account for the heterogeneous, dynamic and contested character of these experiences of collective organization. For the analysis, we take up the relational anthropological approach as a privileged perspective for exploring the complexity of social processes through the recovery of social everyday life of the subjects, their practices and constructions of meanings in their contextual historical relationships. The methodological strategies for the construction of information were mainly based on fieldwork, with in-depth interviews, observations and the gathering of secondary sources.