An Education for Outsiders: Popular Education

This paper aims to develop an approach on social deviance and Popular Education. In this sense, it assumes a basic analytical statement of the sociology of deviance: social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Labelling occurs in all spheres of society. Those groups whose social position gives them weapons and power are best able to enforce their rules. On the other hand, Popular Education has been referring, for instance, to a general practice that covers a variety of social actors - from peasants to workers, women to groups of indigenous peoples and so on - and a variety of topics, whichever generate interest in promoting change. Taking into account such definitions, the paper describes Popular Education as an important alternative for the pedagogical work with outsiders. As an empirical demonstration of this perspective, it focuses on the Black Lives Matter Movement, the drug context and education in prisons.