Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: YASMIM KATELINE DE OLIVEIRA MEIRA

Multiple Territories: The overlap of multiple experiences in Baixada Fluminense

Baixada Fluminense; Territorial devaluation; Conservation Units; Environmental Education. 

The Baixada Fluminense (BF) is a territory made up of a network of complex agents and actions that continually construct and reconstruct it, agents who also formulate and reformulate the representation of this territory. According to Tavares (2007) “to speak of the Baixada Fluminense is to appropriate a category loaded with meanings from multiple discursive constructions. There are countless Baixadas that, in fact, refer to a Baixada, primarily of a geographical nature.” Even with countless facets and configurations that come together in the same space, the BF is still seen through the same prism: that of being undervalued. Therefore, this dissertation research is justified and is based on making explicit the paths that have brought this negative view to this territory and looking for possible ways to enhance it through one of its great potentialities: green areas, in the case of this research we focus on Conservation Units, because it is important to make the potentialities of the Baixada visible so that this contributes to the construction of a new territorial representation, and in this research, it is believed that one of the ways to do this is precisely scientific research. In this sense, the general objective of this research is based on: Analysing how the process of territorialization of the Baixada Fluminense took place in such a way as to make it devalued. The main concepts worked on will be: Territory, Baixada Fluminense, Conservation Units and Environmental Education; among the authors worked on in this dissertation we can mention: Haesbaert (2014), Santos (2001), Raffestin (1993) and Foucault (1999). In the methodology of this research, which is qualitative in nature, more than one methodology will be used, using the dialectical and phenomenological methods to dialog with the methodological resources that consist of: 1) conceptual theoretical surveys, 2) interviews and 3) fieldwork in Conservation Units. The aim is to understand how the historiographical trajectory of the BF has devalued it and to find in environmental education a possible driver of its potential. Thinking of the Conservation Units as the focus of the BF's environmental potential, we will then work on how they relate to the territory and how they can contribute to a new vision of the Baixada.