Marcelo Vieta (Phd) is the Chair of the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education (LHAE) and Associate Professor in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development (AECD), Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UofT) He is also the Co-founder and Co-director of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy & Work (CLSEW at OISE/UT), and former Program Coordinator of AECD and former Director of the Collaborative Specialization in Workplace Learning and Social Change at OISE/UT.
His research and teaching are influenced by the sociology of work, workplace and social movement learning, critical theory, class-struggle approaches, theories of prefiguration, the philosophy of technology, critical development studies, the diverse and community economies approach, and other radical traditions.
Most broadly, Marcelo’s work explores how more cooperation, solidarity, and democracy may be fostered in the workplace and the community via the overarching concept and practices of autogestión. His work also delves into how people learn collectively in and out of struggle — at the workplace, in the community, and in social movements. Social and solidarity economies is the term he adopts for people-centred rather than capital-centred socio-economic experiences where community members work together to co-produce social wealth and more justly distribute goods and services via horizontal and directly democratic arrangements. He is particularly attentive to working people’s experiments in recuperating, transforming, converting, or re-inventing the economy and capitalist organizations into community-based cooperative alternatives, while overcoming neoliberal crises and crafting their own social and economic destinies in the process.
Marcelo’s research practice deploys case study, ethnographic, documentary, participatory action research, interview, phenomenological, and quantitative methods. He particularly endeavours to conduct research collaboratively, working with networks of scholars, social and solidarity economy protagonists and practitioners, and students as co-researchers in the global North and South, with a particular focus on Canada, Argentina, Italy, and other territories in the diverse region commonly known as Latin America/América Latina.
