CRITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND EMANCIPATION: EXPERIENCE OF POPULAR EDUCATION ON LGBT+ POLICIES IN THE CITY OF SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL.
The research’s core issue encompasses the links between the different forms of constructing subjectivity, as well as exercising citizenship through political action and the achievement of autonomy, as made possible through popular educational instruments and their effects on the heterogeneous LGBT+ population. This research aims to draw a comparative mapping between political initiatives and Civil Society Associations, whose focus is on the struggle for both social recognition and redistributive/restorative policies for said LGTB+ population. Popular initiatives – designed to build free educational spaces which are anchored to both current social debates and Human Rights, while promoting coexistence and exchange of knowledge - can offer content worthy of analysis, which in turn highlights precarious social scenarios. In addition to bringing possible contrasts / differences that exist between the mentioned social initiatives and public policies – highlighting the topics of Human Rights, LGBT population + and popular education – this research also focuses on the need to explore the viability between both those aspects, in terms of social transformation and the struggle for universal education, as sanctioned by the Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The contemporaneity of Human Rights debates - from a Popular Education viewpoint- serves as the background for this study, placing the city of São Paulo - and its own pivotal role- at the heart of LGBT+ policy guidelines. This research intends to produce a comparative picture departing from a situational, associative and ethnographic methodology, as well as other tools such as participative observation within urban associative groups, and by means of the methodology of international comparative analyzes on social policies through categories of advances and retreats, possibilities and limitations, as analyzed in both LGBT+ affirmative public policies and popular mobilization. An ultimate purpose being: analyzing all said effects through data gathered from established dialogues and the construction of coexistence with LGBT+ comunity members participating of in the “Núcleos de Educação Popular UNEAfro Luz” and with the people reached by the “Transcidadania” program, of the Laura Vermont LGBT Citizenship Center.