L’action politique des jeunes étudiants au Brésil aujourd’hui : le présage de la fin d’une époque ?

In this article we ask how, and whether university environments, university student identities and student interactions in universities constitute relevant factors in encouraging forms of political engagement among young people in Brazil today. First, we discuss recent contributions regarding the process of political subjectification in young Brazilians, and their potential to articulate a project for social and political change. Next, we discuss the results of interviews with young university students who are actively involved with groups that are detached from the mainstream student movement. Their way of doing politics, by questioning the representativeness, institutionalism, and hierarchisation of collective modes of organization, seems to be a crucial aspect of the nonetheless precarious attempt by young people to demonstrate their resistance to a model of participative democracy that is showing signs of exhaustion