Project Overview 

The PAR activities of Federal University of Pará (UFPA) consist in the implementation of two Collectives of Territorial Governance (COGTER). The COGTER of the Tocantine Amazon consists in the reunion of the local leaderships of communities and social movements in six municipalities situated along the Tocantins River: Baião, Cametá (headquarters of the actions of the COGTER, due to having a UFPA campus), Igarapé-Miri, Limoeiro do Ajurú, Mocajuba, and Oeiras do Pará. The Interethnic COGTER of the Municipality of Moju consists in the union of two peoples as focus of action: the Quilombola Territory of Jambuaçu, and the territory of the indigenous tribe of the Anambé, both located in the municipality of Moju.

 

In the map below, it is showed the location of the municipalities involved in the two COGTERs, with a point of reference from Brazil at the bottom-left corner.

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Above figure: Location of the municipalities involved in the two COGTERs
Source: Ayan Fleischmann (2018).

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There are two main methodologies on which this project is based: the Participatory Action-Research (PAR), and the Alternance Pedagogy. In a PAR, the stakeholders are not only oriented and educated towards a certain goal, but take part in the process with their expertises, knowledge of the site of impact, and contributions to the planning and interventions. The Alternance Pedagogy, used generally for students - but in this case for stakeholders - that live in rural areas mainly, where the actions are divided in a University Time, always followed by a Community Time. During the University Time, the stakeholders are gathered presentially, (generally in a Rural Familiar House (CFR), which is a school-like structure used freely by the community, and in this specific case in the CFR of Cametá), for a length of time that varies from a whole day to a few days, i.e. a time of intensive study, planning and sharing of results of actions; in the Community Time, the stakeholders go back to their communities and perform planned investigations and interventions (Caliari et al., 2002). The main goal of the project is to stablish two COGTER that will not only function during the length of the project – four University Times and three Community Times each - but will keep working as a united force of social and political articulation long after the project is over