Sociology of Space and Urban Boundaries. Embodiment through Communitarian Education.

This paper presents the research output of a critical ethnographic study in Portugal - Urban Boundaries project^[1], which was carried out with ‘invisible communities’ in the outskirts of Lisbon Metropolitan area. The study required the development of an interdisciplinary research on the concept of space, in order to attend the needs from three different cultural groups. The research project includes members of each group, cooperating in order to attend each one’s main goals: (i) the Academic group focuses on the necessity of an emancipatory educational policy and practice; (ii) the Bairro group is centred on the urge of having water supply in their territory; (iii) the Fishing group is working on strengthening their social voice.

The concept of Space is reconstructed by an interdisciplinary view, in which Situationality (Freire, 1970), Curriculum Trivium (D’Ambrosio, 2006), Act (Žižek, 2008), Topology (Balibar, [2002] 2011), and Communitarian Education (Mesquita et al., 2011) supply a theoretical toolkit for a collective critical analysis and local intervention. In that sense, the Curriculum Trivium is used for the understanding, recognition, and empowerment of the communities through local educational processes, as fundamental paraphernalia of survival. The concept of Topology is used as an analytic layer in the process of development in diversity - understanding the diversity of spatial and territorial experiences and claims in the project by multiple representations (descriptions, narratives, poems, photographs, paintings, among other). The concept of Act is used to argue the encounter of the three involved communities and the collective recognition of their own Situationality - materially and symbolically speaking. The concept of Communitarian Education allows the knowledge of the construction of the local educative practices and the local embodied questions of knowledge, power, affection, and local human identity.

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[1] The project was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/CPE-CED/119695/2010) http://fronteirasurbanas.ie.ul.pt

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