Thinking Inside the Box is a decolonial pedagogical framework that aims to create transformative, liberatory learning experiences through a critical engagement with archives.

The framework was first conceptualised by Anna Grimaldi and Vinicius de Carvalho in 2016. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Thinking Inside the Box intends to mobilise the situated knowledges and experiences of learners through the collective interpretation of archival materials. Through this, the project intends to generate knowledge that incites politically and socially -conscious academic activism with authentic, real-world impact.

The concept of ‘thinking inside the box’ arose as a provocation to historians and researchers of Latin America to engage with a specific archive that had recently been revived by the Special Collections of Senate House Library. The collection of Latin American Political Posters and Pamphlets held rare insights into Cold War-era historical processes from the perspective of marginal groups, offering the opportunity to challenge or complement dominant historical narratives. Our principle concept thus pushes back against the idea that interpretive innovation comes only from thinking outside the box (or the archive), arguing that new interpretations become available with every new glance one takes at what is already placed inside it.

The project has been rooted in the context of Cold War Latin America, a time in which several nations of the region fell victim to a wave of US-backed military-authoritarian dictatorships. The framework thus draws from a distinct body of critical debate around the counter-hegemonic potential of archives as sites of contestation. Archives created in clandestinity and/or exile served the function of challenging and proposing alternatives to the narratives of authoritarian states seeking to legitimise and/or obscure authoritarian practices of state terror through censorship, political imprisonment, forced exile, torture and disappearance. From the cultural, artistic and discursive production of social movement activists to armed guerrilla groups, artefacts of this period hold the potential to reignite situated dialectics of human rights, social justice and development oriented to the reality of the Global South.

Our engagement with the archive thus proposes a reawakening of past struggles, discourses, semiotics and practices to inspire collective and critical reflection, knowledge production and political action in the present. We engage concepts of performance and repertoire to inspire learners in reawakening struggles of the past, giving them new meaning and agency with the ability to make meaningful contributions to a range of publics. Most importantly, the process is horizontal: we enable students to co-create and co-curate their learning and skills, while providing our experience as leaders, researchers, educators and co-learners. In a context of increasing prescription and ‘streamlining’ of knowledge, professional or personal development, we challenge exclusion, inequality and disengagement.

So far, the framework has been led by the King’s College London and the University of Leeds, and has engaged various higher education institutions, including the School of Advanced Studies, the London School of Economics, Queen Mary’s, and the University of Liverpool. It has also connected with various community-led movements, organisations and cultural institutions. As we continue to expand and engage new partners, our goal is to contribute to enhancing the transformative potential of pedagogical practices and student experiences. We welcome collaborations with archival collections, academic communities and civil-society organisations to continue facilitating new iterations of Thinking Inside the Box.

Anna Grimaldi and Vinicius de Carvalho
April 2022

To learn about our latest project, Thinking Inside the Box: Revolutions, click here.

To view our publications, click here.

The first exhibition took place in 2021, when students from King’s College visited the Senate House Library’s Latin American Political Pamphlet collection. The images making up the exhibition were all created to provoke political engagement, to promote social justice, and to reclaim human rights. The pamphlets and posters they come from had been sleeping inside their boxes for quite a long time; beginning a dialogue with them today reminds us that the values they represent are still needed.

Check out last year’s project: http://www.brazilinstitute.org/thinkinginsidethebox

Following the success of the inaugural edition of the project in 2022, Thinking Inside the Box: 1973 will materialize as a series of events from February to April 2023 across UK universities and cultural institutions, culminating in a week-long “festival.” These events will focus on social justice and resistance to authoritarianism in Latin America in 1973.

Fifty years after the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile, Thinking Inside the Box: 1973 aims to unearth and amplify the lived experiences that dictatorial forces sought to erase through the reinterpretation and performance of archival materials, looking to connect the past and present. We invite you to join us as we look to reanimate dormant political subjects and liberate knowledge from its static state of being, bringing to life the ideas, practices, hopes, and struggles that these artifacts of political resistance and international solidarity from the period contain.

Following the success of 2023, This year the project is back with its third edition and has as a theme the concept of ‘Revolutions’ in Latin America and how they are expressed at the Special Collections Latin American Political Pamphlets archive at Senate House Library.

According to Paulo Freire, “(…) a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed.” (2005, pp 125-6). The exercise of performing the posters and pamphlets of the collection where revolutionary because exactly reflection and action were required from each of the participants. What we see in this year’s exhibition is not only posters but exercises of dialogue that require the authors to question their worldview, express their interpretations, and propose also questions to the audience.

Students didn’t receive a ‘script’ about what they should or not explore in their interpretations of the material. As we intend to experiment with a revolutionary approach to education, we were very aware of Freire’s recommendation: “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing’, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination.” (2005, p126). Dealing with pamphlets and posters with a clear political orientation and communication objectives, students engaged critically with their chosen artifact, not merely ‘accepting’ their messages, but scrutinizing their revolutionary content.

We believe that this experience of ‘thinking inside the box’ provokes in everyone involved in the project - including you, our reader – the sense of being part of a revolutionary dialogue, because “sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue.” (Freire, 2005, p128)

This project would be not possible without the participation and contribution of several actors and sponsors, all of them acknowledged on these pages. But the most important of them are the students engaged in the project this year. They dedicated an immense amount of work to making this dialogue a reality. They have been truly revolutionaries. They went beyond their boundaries, exploring a world – Latin America – not familiar to many of them, and experiencing the difficult combination of reflection and action. I don’t have enough words to thank them, to congratulate them, to express how much I am proud of them, and to measure how much they have taught me during the exercise of reenacting these posters. They remind me of the power of dialogue for humanization.

I finish with another Freire’s quotation that summarizes well the reasons why we engage in projects like Thinking Inside the box, a project of dialogue and transformation: “The dialogue which is radically necessary to revolution corresponds to another radical need: that of women and men as beings who cannot be truly human apart from communication, for they are essentially communicative creatures. To impede communication is to reduce men to the status of “things” – and this is a job for oppressor, not for revolutionaries.” (2005, p 129)

Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Oppressed. (Trad. Myra Bergman Ramos). Continuum: New York, 2005.