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Political flow in critical ethnography. Orders and disorders in a communitarian education project
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Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
The discussion proposed in this paper will focus on the emerging social
dynamics in local communities, namely its inner disorder, after the
development of an ethnographical educational project - Urban Boundaries:
the dynamic of the cultural encounters in the communitarian education.
In 2010, a local popular movement from Costa de Caparica/Portugal called
Urban Boundaries decided collectively to develop an educational project.
This movement faced the political oppression experienced by two local
communities – the fishing community and the bairro community.
The educational dynamics of this movement, founded in Paulo Freire’s
notions, promoted the encounter between silenced neighbours, allowing for a
dialogical space fed by knowledge exchange, survival practices, and the
recognition of diversity and unity - transversal among communities’
members. Its sudden conclusion, against the will of community members,
has led to a strengthening of their will to develop collective work. Hence
began the Urban Boundaries project (UB), with the same actors and at the
same place, but now as an academic research project.
When the Urban Boundaries project (UB) started, both communities had a
main common struggle: access to water. The fishing community was
forbidden to fish in the urban front, exactly where the local government has
built them a fish market less than four years ago. The bairro community, an
"illegal" urban settlement dated over forty years, had no piped water. Its
residents, over 450 people, needed to walk about one kilometer to fetch
water in a public fountain. Local politics is continually developed without
regarding these two communities; they are only considered in the creation of
allegedly successful welfare programs, which they never attended.
The collective process lived in the construction of the UB transforms itself
in a tool with common grounds, bringing issues of local survival to the
research questions. For the fishing community, the will to assert its voice
was an important issue. So, in the UB, this issue was worked through the life
stories – material and immaterial local heritage, through the local cultural
diversity. Moreover, the issue of human rights (i.e., the right to water, the
right to be recognized as residents, and the right to education), was central to
the bairro community. Therefore, activities of multiple cartography and
critical alphabetization were developed in the UB.
The development of the project maintained its central focus: to create inner
tools to collectively remove the invisibility cloak that hung over both
communities and, through a mediation process, to promote an emancipatory
communitarian education. The aim was the construction of a collective
critical voice to guarantee local political actions, using the critical
ethnography methodology. The research process, as an ethnography of itself,
was based on multiple field notes, photographs, audio and video recordings,
and other artifacts, in a practice of participant observation with the
continuing involvement of the three communities (the academic community
being the third) in data collection, interpretation and dissemination, as well
as the political actions inherent to the research processes. In this research
approach based on Critical Social Theory, rather than an understanding of
reality, the proposal is to transform it. So, the information obtained from the
ethnography was reinvested in the construction of a critical perspective of
the lives of the members of these communities, through a constant dialogical
process.
This is a politically committed research approach, which requires the
involvement of all stakeholders in the deconstruction of the social and
political reality that oppresses those most economically disadvantaged
communities and maintains the hegemonic groups. In this sense, this
ethnographic approach required the collaborative involvement of academic
researchers and members of local communities in praxis, in order to give
visibility to those who are excluded from the decision-making forums; a
transformative praxis in our thinking oppressed by the massificated idea of
the misery as given condition. However, these processes of emancipation,
collectivity, and visibility, achieved by both communities, brought to them
their exotic character and a welfarist process.
In this paper our central focus is to discuss the concept of empowerment,
emancipation, and collectivity, and their relations in the light of existing
political flows in the critical ethnographic practice developed in the UB.
The discussion is mediated by the identification of some tensions, in the
intra and inter relational spaces of the three communities directly involved,
as well as with the new relations that were being developed during the
project. To the proposed mediation we begin with a critical deconstruction
of these concepts through Critical Social Theory, to understand the inner
disorder in and among these three communities.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Communitarian education Critical ethnography Disorder Mediation Boundaries Micro-politics
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Mesquita, M., Freire, I., & Caetano, A. P. (2015). Political flow in critical ethnography - Orders and disorders in a communitarian education project. In e-proceeding at The 10th Annual Liverpool Symposium. Reflection in action: Taking stock of 10 years of ethnography symposia (pp. 1-3). Liverpool: University of Liverpool.