Aye. a Praxis of Pracademics' Body

AYE - Action-research for Youth in Europe, as a ERASMUS+ project, has the challenge of to create dynamics of cooperation between youth collectives and universities, and being developed in four countries – France, Portugal, Italy, and Finland. In Portugal, with Ocean Literacy Observatory–NOVA University of Lisbon, and the EBANO Collective – a Youth Association, the main goal is to promote action research with young people through the art. The project is developed in the Trafaria – a coastal village on the other bank the European capital – Lisbon, which presents a complex, systemic, and diverse territory - a third margin. There is a significant heterogeneity of social groups - from small-scale artisanal fishermen to communities of African origins that suffer from marginalization processes. Nowadays, the ideal of development for the area became to take advantage of the touristic and landscape potential. The AYE in Portugal comes to counter-colonize the idea of development, searching in the own local context tools to minimize the detachment between academy, associations, communities, and Trafaria's territory. Moreover, research and projects related to Trafaria have been carried out top-down without genuinely considering the communities' rich coastal and riverside spatial knowledge, also manifested thought their art. Thus, the Academy-YouthAssociation body, acting through the belonging in this locality, presents itself with an emergency character in an attempt to overcome the historical lack of citizen participation and to confer greater justice in the production and living of this territory. This collective of people active in both civil society and academy identify themselves as pracademics - an emergent human posture to collectivetly act on the intellectual diversity encounters based on equal-liberty, bringing a cosmology to the humanscapes. The research process behind this co-construction generates politicization and allows for greater critical problematization of everyday territorial situations and sociocultural and ecological relations.