FAVELAS VOX YOUTUBE MANUAL

“Just get down off your pedestal,” stresses Brum, who denounces the use of academic language as a means to impose a false sense of superiority. What people learn at university, we learn on the job.”ĭescribing the relationship between favelas and academia, Goulart said there is a “salvationist vision” which underpins academics’ desire to conduct research in favelas: “they think that with their theses they are going to change the world!”īrum and Goulart shed light on the linguistic appropriation and hierarchization adopted by many academics. Oliveira echoed Gomes, saying that many researchers working in favelas “say we are creative, but we are just survivors. “Academia… has always been a source of unease and frustration for me,” Gomes continued, urging academics to understand that the favela “is not a safari… It’s a place of living, of understanding, knowledge.” We, the people, are not academics, but we have so much knowledge, which is built through our responses to challenges and threats,” said Gomes, expressing a common understanding at the event-that favelas are producers of knowledge through their constant invention and reinvention in the face of challenges-and that rather than recognized for it, are often exploited.

FAVELAS VOX YOUTUBE MANUAL

We are not a country built for the manual laborers, for those who have built this city, this state, this country. The discussion was moderated by Iamê da Silva of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Laboratory of Plant Ecology, a member of the SFN’s Working Group on Environmental Education. The panel was comprised of Fransérgio Goulart, executive coordinator of the Right to Memory and Racial Justice Initiative and developer of the “What and for Whom does Favela Research Serve?” discussion forum Daniel Fonseca of the Laboratory of Action and Research in Environmental Education (LAPEAr) at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) Camilla Reis, also of LAPEAr Gildete Barros, principal of Brito Broca public elementary school in Morro da Formiga favela Iara Oliveira, cofounder of the education initiative Alfazendo in the City of God favela Zoraide Gomes, known as ‘Cris dos Prazeres,’ of ReciclAção in Morro dos Prazeres favela Verônica Parente, director of the Green School Project in Cidade Alta and Alan Brum of the Roots in Movement Institute ( Raizes em Movimento) and its CEPEDOCA initiative in the Complexo do Alemão favelas. The Zoom teach-in was part of UN-Habitat’s 2020 Urban Circuit, was livestreamed on their YouTube channel, and illustrated by artist Geisa Paganini.

The participants condemned common patterns of academic approaches toward favelas, while also offering up new modes of thinking that aim to reconfigure this often exploitative relationship.

The virtual panel on October 14, “ Favela-Academia Dialogue: Necessary Steps Toward Environmental Education,” organized by Catalytic Communities’ Sustainable Favela Network’s (SFN) Working Group on Environmental Education, discussed the tensions in the relationship between universities and favelas.

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