Coproducing life histories: The ethnographic challenges of producing knowledge with the segregated urban communities

This presentation seeks to approach the process of production of social histories focusing on two differentiated perspectives: the vision that belongs to the community and inhabitants of an Segregated Urban Community (SUC) and the one that the teachers and school workers have created from their institutional practice. The approach, held on the perspective of the methodology of coproductive-investigation, will interrogate on the SUC construction meanings and its reconfigurations. At the same time will contribute to the understanding of the collective and subjective resistances to the social dominations and governmental modulations produced in this process. The proposal implies a recondition of the knowledge production process, in which the investigated object turns into a knowledge co- producer, requiring a simultaneous change in the perspectives of both, the academic investigator and the investigated subject, giving form to new co-investigative praxis.

Through this dynamics of critical revision of the collective findings and self-discoveries, we will analyse the social process of the last three decades, concentrating mainly on the segregation, sequestrations, custody and identity resistance processes. The present work plan is set within an investigation project directed by Alberto L Bialakowsky  with  venue in the Gino Germani Institute (FCS-UBA), that has been in develop since 1999 in the SUC “La Matera” located at the south side, and “Ejercito de los Andes” at the west side of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, Argentina.