Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Considering that young people may have an important role in the development of the communities to which they belong, this paper intends to analyse contexts of reflection, dialogue, non-formal learning, and creative expression to understand how this group can construct a relation with their city from collective experiences of citizen participation. The main challenges of this research project, on the basis of this proposal, is to understand how young people relate to their community, what kind of social ties they establish and if and how they practice their citizen participation in the context of their city - Porto (Portugal). In an exploratory stage, a local youth group has been challenged to (re)think the city and their relationship with it, in order to co-authoring a set of creative experimental practices to produce social knowledge. By proposing multimedia resources and artistic forms of individual and collective language expression, the narratives generated may contribute to the construction of spaces of communication, action, poetic, and performative manifestation. This implies the search for the matching up of emancipating different ways of being, seeing, listening, talking, acting, and building the world. In this way, platforms can be created for the claim of rights, namely, the right to the city, proposing its reinvention and (re)construction on new bases (Lefebvre, 2008). This suggests plural alternatives.