In the framework of the GCSMUS strategic action scheme, the Action 4 speaker Fraya Frehse, scientific coordinator Ignacio Castillo Ulloa and doctoral student Caio Moraes Reis coordinated the hybrid (online and onsite) UrbanSus Seminar “Everyday Spatialities of Homelessness in Covid-19 São Paulo: Articulating Research and Practice” at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) of the University of São Paulo (USP) on 13 April 2022 (see banner below).
Organized in three sessions and following a first UrbanSus seminar on the daily life of people dwelling in the streets of São Paulo during the Covid-19 pandemic, which had taken place at IEA-USP in November and December 2020, this second event addressed the following question: How can social sciences sensitive to the spatial dimension of social practices (in particular, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, and urbanism) contribute to professional practice that attend to the São Paulo homeless population in Covid-19 times — including the most recent census of the homeless population promoted by the São Paulo City Hall?
In search of answers, the seminar put in dialogue researchers from the university and agents of professional practice dealing directly with homeless people around the potentialities and limitations of a specific transdisciplinary knowledge on dwelling in the streets that Action 4 helped to coproduce through a peculiar training course of spatial methods. It had firstly been offered to an interdisciplinary group of graduate students, and more recently, with the aid of these same students, to social workers. During this doublephase experience, GCSMUS scientists and social workers were encouraged to exchange knowledge about the everyday spatialities of dwelling in the streets of Covid-19 São Paulo; that is, about the daily bodily arrangements that men, women and children have made of the public spaces where they dwell, while assigning meanings to their interactions with people, institutions and objects, with animals and plants there.
The seminar discussions were held on hybrid modus and in Portuguese on April 13th, 2022 at 2pm (BRT) and recorded on YouTube as follows.
The resulting critical report may be read in English and in Portuguese as follows.
