Producing local knowledge in vulnerable contexts: An interactive website in Manguinhos, Brazil

This paper discusses the collective production of the website www.conhecendomanguinhos.fiocruz.br by the Manguinhos Local Laboratory (MLL). The MLL is an extended action research group, which comprises FIOCRUZ staff and people who live in the Manguinhos territory. This research group attempts to develop strategies of health promotion that combine science and citizenship, build an empathic ways to learn about and interact with the place, and create multidisciplinary and polyphonic approaches to debate social and environmental vulnerabilities. The Manguinhos territory, the research empirical object, comprises 11 communities and more than 40 thousand people. In this area, residents face various social, environmental and health problems, including violence, State absence, and limited organisation capacity. The website is a virtual archive that organises knowledge and information; besides that, it also promotes learning and interaction among local people, particularly youngsters. It has been created based on two assumptions: (1) to institutionalize social participation in the context of SUS, and (2) to include residents in a participatory way. Nevertheless, creating the website also had to overcome challenges, such as developing a methodology to integrate the various perspectives and pieces of information that were offered by the research group members. The main objective of this paper is to describe the building process of each theme that forms the website (History of People and Places; Time Line; Territory & Citizenship and Health, Environment & Development), as well as, its relationship with the group’s aspirations.