From FE-Unicamp to the public debate on technology and democracy.
The Graduate Program in Education at the Faculty of Education of Unicamp (FE-Unicamp) has nominated researcher Henrique Zoqui Martins Parra as Outstanding Alumnus 2025 in the graduate category. A professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and a member of the Latin American Network of Studies in Surveillance, Technology and Society (LAVITS), Parra's career has been recognized for its consistent intellectual output and commitment to teaching, research, and outreach in the field of Education.
Established by a resolution of the University Council, the Unicamp Outstanding Alumni Award recognizes former students who have excelled in their professional fields, reinforcing the university's bond with those who continue to produce knowledge and social impact after graduation. More information about the initiative can be found at [website address - please insert here]. CONSU-A-014/2023 resolution, which creates the award. The award ceremony will be held on 12/15/25, at 15:00 PM, at the UNICAMP Convention Center (auditorium 1) – Avenida Érico Veríssimo, 500 – Cidade Universitária, Campinas/SP. There will be a live broadcast via the following link:
When technologies shape us
When commenting on the significance of the award, Parra draws attention to a choice that runs throughout his academic career: inverting the most common question when discussing technology and education. Instead of asking "how to use such technology in teaching or research," he proposes starting with another question: "how are technologies already educating us?"
The answer, according to him, lies in abandoning the idea that digital technologies are merely neutral tools serving pre-defined objectives. "We consider technologies as environments through which we relate to the world," explains the researcher. This means investigating how they function, but also how, by using them, "they make us feel, think, and do things differently," transforming values, sensibilities, ways of reasoning, and modes of being in society.
From "Leviathan" to "The Network": who rules our connected world?
This key to understanding already appeared in Henrique Parra's doctoral thesis, entitled "The Leviathan and the Network," defended at FE-Unicamp. In his work, the researcher examines the transformations in the forms of production, access, and circulation of knowledge promoted by the internet between the end of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.
The “Leviathan,” Parra reminds us, is not merely the State in the strict sense, but an image of a certain world configuration, woven between forms of knowledge, regimes of visibility, and techniques of power. On one hand, there was a moment of openness and democratization – what he calls the “brief summer of the counter-hegemonic Internet.” On the other, new forms of centralization and control were emerging, both political and economic.
Parra describes how this initial tension gave way to a process of "colonization and reorganization of the entire digital ecosystem" by large private technology companies and by political-state power structures. This diagnosis, already hinted at in his thesis, becomes even more acute in the present, where digital platforms and infrastructures are beginning to organize intimate and ordinary dimensions of life – from personal relationships to educational, financial, and political practices, including the functioning of cities and governments. This configuration, the researcher argues, presents itself as a technocratic power driven by a corporate rationality that threatens and corrodes democratic practices and institutions.
Living connected: how the digital world affects what we think and feel.
Another area of research for Henrique Parra concerns the "Technocene" and cyber-mediated ways of life. In simple terms, it involves thinking about how digital mediation and datafication reconfigure our daily lives, our knowledge, and our ways of acting politically.
Today it is difficult to imagine a daily activity that does not involve some type of digital-cybernetic technology: working, studying, commuting, taking care of one's health, forming emotional relationships, consuming information. "We know that technologies are not neutral," he states.
Therefore, in his research, he seeks to understand how these mediations transform the way we read and interpret the world, how we recognize the real and the true, how we perceive our relationships and ourselves. It is a profound change in sensitivity and rationality, which impacts both the classroom and the public sphere.
Technologies for another possible world
This critical perspective doesn't end with pointing out problems. A central part of Parra's reflection focuses on the need to imagine and build other socio-technical arrangements capable of confronting the ongoing civilizational and socio-environmental collapse. He observes that much of the digital technology we use was conceived to produce practicality, agility, and productivity, materializing a worldview that favors infinite growth, competition, extractivism, and military and corporate expansion.
If we want to "fork" this path, says the researcher, it will be necessary to deliberate collectively on technological creation and bet on technologies guided by other values: sufficiency instead of the logic of growth at any cost, collective care instead of individualizing self-sufficiency, common goods instead of value extraction and income concentration, communality as opposed to the competitive and narcissistic subject of social networks, autonomy and democratic self-governance instead of opaque forms of control.
In this sense, Parra brings the discussion about technology closer to debates about coloniality, race, gender, and cosmopolitics. He emphasizes that, in Brazil and Latin America, there is much to learn from indigenous peoples, quilombola communities, women, racialized people, and collectives fighting for rights, who daily demonstrate how the "technical order of the world" produces and reproduces historical inequalities. The idea of "cosmotechnical diversity," which appears in his work, is linked precisely to the possibility of articulating other worldviews and technological practices capable of sustaining less destructive and more supportive ways of life.
When research intersects with social struggles.
This concern with shifting the center of knowledge production also guides the extension and collaborative research experiences coordinated by Henrique Parra. He highlights that the growing presence of historically vulnerable and marginalized individuals in public universities has provoked important internal transformations, but he reminds us that the usual ways of teaching, researching, and relating to external audiences still frequently reproduce coloniality and asymmetries between different knowledge regimes.
In developing projects in partnership with social movements, collectives, associations, and grassroots groups, Parra insists on recognizing these actors as "political collectives that are also cognitive-epistemic actors." From this perspective, more dialogical scientific practices – both in the production and circulation of knowledge – can contribute to more robust responses to the multiple crises we are experiencing. For the researcher, the so-called "crisis of scientific legitimacy" and the phenomena usually grouped under the label of "post-truth" are deeply intertwined with the contemporary political and democratic crisis.
Creating scientific knowledge capable of supporting "better collective responses to the civilizational collapse we have produced," Parra argues, also depends on the invention of new political forms that transform our ways of educating and producing knowledge.
What does Henrique Parra's career path tell us about education today?
By recognizing Henrique Parra as a Distinguished Alumnus of 2025, the Postgraduate Program in Education at FE-Unicamp celebrates not only a successful individual trajectory, but also a way of conducting educational research that addresses urgent contemporary issues: the role of technologies in training practices, the defense of democracy against technocratic and corporate powers, and the search for other possible worlds grounded in experiences of resistance and reinvention. For students and researchers in the field, his trajectory is a reminder that reflecting on education today necessarily implies asking not only how we teach with technologies, but also how we want to be educated by them – and with whom we wish to build these answers.
