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The community is built from the integration and different exchanges between collectives. As a human form of groupment, it is defined by two central elements: politics and space. Thus, with modernity, the dependence from what is outside outweighs what is within, where the hegemonic actors manage to renew the social relations, the means of production and even the understanding about these spaces. Human sciences are also responsible in reproducing different views about the concept of community and its' applications. In Brazil, the political relations stand out on the conformation of communities. The authoritarianism of hegemonic classes imposed in the daily living and the discourse based on local relevance hide the conflicts lived within the communities and hinder internal and external political action of the populace. This paper discusses these questions from a theorical review of authors who work with the theme in order to explain a given local reality. It is stressed the necessity of a political and historical analysis about how the communities spatialize, their dynamics and transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the so-called digital culture, this paper discusses the issue of education and the political implications of the distance learning expansion movement in Brazil. In addition to the advances in the democratization of the access to information through the mediation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), which should be recognized as an effort to spread a certain "political culture", this does not necessarily mean, as Habermas (2003b) recalls, that the effective political participation of citizens is assured, especially in light of recurrent dislocation between the political public sphere and civil society. What are the interests behind the phenomenon of digitization of culture? And what is the purpose of education in this new cultural context? As an expression of contemporary social life, digital culture generates structural changes, not only in the form of transmission and access to culture, but also in the very concept and attitude towards culture, with decisive political implications for education. That leads us to think, for example, about the differences between the concepts of education present in the classical Greek Paideia culture, in the modern culture of Bildung, and in the contemporary educational model increasingly subservient to the ICTs we now have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss how the practices and the scope of political action can be a mode of subjectivation for young people today. By means of the analysis of 19 interviews with Brazilian youngsters of Rio de Janeiro, where their militancy in schools, colleges, and political parties was investigated, we could determine three central aspects which qualify the process of self construction through political activism: the facing of unknown outcomes, the relevance of action in the present, and the conflicts between public and private spheres, which demand totalizing the field of identifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]