Children’s drawings and sociocultural cartography

image production and fieldwork around a protected area in the metropolitan region of Belem, Para (Brazil)

Abstract

This work corresponds to a stage of an ethnography carried out with young schoolchildren who live in an environmental protection area in the metropolitan region of Belém do Pará, and consists of the realization of a sketching workshop that aimed to carry out an activity of pedagogical approach with the student interlocutors of investigation, while allowing the researcher to recognize, from a «matrix sketch» made through raids previous in the research space, significant points in the territory that could contribute to the general objective of the research: understanding the perceptions of the environments to be explored from images taken with home cameras, in collaboration with the research subjects themselves. The workshop proposal is performed with three fundamental tasks: 1) identify housing points; 2) find play spaces; 3) on the back of the paper, write or draw: what they like and what they don’t like about the spaces they live in, as well as what they would like that territory to have, giving even more room for children’s imagination. The activity of the sketches, in fact, generated an important initial «approach» for the next phases of the investigation and analysis of these materials allowed us to understand the occupation of the territory and practiced locations that would be difficult to inventory through traditional research using methodologies of field work with adults, revealing a «situational map» of tension in relation to state guidelines regarding the use of comprehensive protection environments.