Toolkit for Popular Research
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To occupy land is to make a claim. To build a research centre is to build the means of defending that claim over time. This toolkit grows out of a long collaboration between the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), its research centre, the Centro de Pesquisa Popular (CPP), and the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London.
Manualifesto is a blueprint, a political manifesto and a call for action for movements that want to produce their own knowledge, on their own terms. Its methods – storytelling, counter-mapping, participatory photography and more – are the manifesto in practice. They were developed through a series of workshops and fieldworks with popular researchers at the Centro de Pesquisa Popular (CPP), and are written up here with honest notes on what worked and what did not. The academy took part as a guest, not as principal investigator. Its resources served priorities the movement had already set. Built by and for the movement, and open to any collective that refuses to be the object of research and insists on being its subject. Take what is useful. Adapt it. Pass it on.
Research carried out in collaboration with the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London and the Centro de Pesquisa Popular (CPP), funded by an Impact Acceleration Account grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
This toolkit is animated by a single, unwavering conviction: research is a political act, and the right to conduct it must be wrested from the academy's monopoly. We recognise that research and knowledge are deeply connected to power. Data, methods, maps and reports are often used by institutions to justify decisions that perpetuate the existing conditions, control narratives, and exclude communities.
At the same time, we must state clearly what we aim to refuse: extractive research practices, the concentration of knowledge in academic or institutional spaces, the idea that only certain forms of knowledge are valid, and complex and “technical” language used to exclude rather than include. We believe knowledge should be collective, accessible, useful and rooted in lived experience and the everyday.
Our work therefore carries this tradition forward with a specific and deliberate intensification. We are moving from participation in research projects designed and controlled by others to collective sovereignty over the entire research apparatus. We are building the institutional forms, the shared skills, and the political will necessary to ensure that inquiry into the conditions of the urban poor is directed by the urban poor themselves.
Documents
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Gallery
Team
Geane de Souza Alves Bélgica del Cármen Saez Micheline Maria Pereira da Silva Marcelus Annus Lui Edwirgem Rosa de Souza Hélio Alexandre da Silva Alberto Fierro Milagros Vidal Raktim Ray Vafa Dianati
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