10 - Conceptualising community development through a pedagogy of convivência: youth, race and territory in Brazil

Summary

Introduction

This chapter reflects upon the territorialised and racialised distinctions of rights experienced by young people living in Brazilian urban peripheries. It draws from direct work experience and research conducted in Brazil with young people whose lives are crossed by the overlaps between territorial stigma, racism, poverty, social insecurity, involvement in illicit activities, contact with criminal justice and diverse experiences of violence and violation of human rights. This includes a range of initiatives in which the authors were directly involved, such as: research on the dynamics of involvement of children and young people in the networks of drug trafficking and other illicit activities in Brazil (Silva and Urani, 2002; Observatório de Favelas, 2006; Silva et al, 2008, 2009; Fernandes, 2009, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2014); and development of approaches and methodologies of prevention and creation of alternatives for children and young people involved in drug trafficking and other illicit networks (Fernandes and Rodriguez, 2009, 2015; Fernandes et al, 2009; Rodriguez, 2013).

The chapter benefits from the experience of both authors who have worked between UK (mostly Scotland) and Brazil over the past decade. It provided us a unique opportunity to reflect upon issues affecting marginalised young people in both countries. It also enabled us to engage in a critical reflection on possibilities and limits of cultural translations, diverse sociohistorical realities and contrasting policy-practice environments. Throughout the chapter we will try to make some bridges with our experiences in the UK to make sense of some ideas and critical issues affecting young people in the two countries, which we expect can also be used to reflect more widely about marginalised young people elsewhere.

In this chapter we wanted to reflect on some concepts and approaches for community development through the lenses of a pedagogy of convivência/coexistence (Fernandes et al, 2018a). We used our experience of work in Brazil as a starting point but expect these ideas to be a source of dialogue and conversation internationally. Our experiences over the past decade in promoting dialogues between Brazil and Scotland/wider UK has proved to be challenging for the elaboration of certain concepts and we noted a great risk to be converted by hegemonic epistemologies at the expense of ‘cultural translation’ and ‘language translation’. To address that, we opted to adopt a bilingual approach to some concepts as it is the case for convivência/coexistence and potência/potency.