Extended Action-Research Community: building knowledge and practices in daily and affective dialogue with the territory

Abstract

The article aims to discuss the lessons learned from the Extended Action-Research Community (CAP) in favelas in Rio de Janeiro, as a contribution to conceptual and methodological discussions in the field of Public Health, from the perspective of Emancipatory Health Promotion and Popular Education. With the CAPs, we seek to respond to one of the main challenges of qualitative research in favelas: a methodological construction that makes it possible to understand the way the residents of these territories experience and respond to health situations. The territory, as an integrative category of analysis to understand the processes of social determination of health, requires CAP to configure itself with a network of interdisciplinary dialogues and between different social agents. The analysis of the documentary material base produced in the period 2003-2020, using the systematization of experience as a research methodology, resulted in the identification of three axes that structure the CAP method: 1) everyday life as the dynamics gear of CAP; 2) territory and the social agents of dialogue; and 3) artisanal tools to collaborate with the territory. Based on these axes, we conclude that the CAP method is a network for knowledge production and dialogue between people-places-territories.