For an epistemology about the city in the company of children

Abstract

This paper proposes to dialogue with some findings of an ethnographic study that had as unit of analysis the paths of children home-school-home in a popular neighbourhood of Vitória/ES. Through observations, networks of conversations, drawings, walks through the streets and varied geo-technological resources, it is possible to understand a reality produced by children, forged within the experiences they make with and in the city and in the streets where they live or walk by. It is highlighted how much children know, experience, find it unfamiliar and challenge a city that is little unveiled in and by school. At the same time that they are victims of its contradictions and perversities, they learn, in the weave of daily life, to establish other possible links and to reveal ways of surviving and understanding events. The restrictions and possibilities of living childhood in such complex and challenging daily situations; the transience of borders previously perceived and hardened; the confrontation of the usual stories of violence and of struggles of life; how they redefine ways of living in an urban place crossed by perverse circuits of inequality and injustice; and how they formulate expectations, opinions and reframe the place where they live and study seem to indicate the need for an epistemology about the city in the company of children.