Criança assentada: a escuta psicanalítica como um dispositivo no território

Abstract

This research investigates the constitution of childhood in the "Glória Settlement" (Élisson Prieto neighborhood), in Uberlândia-MG, Brazil. The main objective is to understand, through psychoanalysis in dialogue with critical geography and decolonial thought, the articulation of the child's subjective experience with material conditions of poverty and precariousness. The figuration of the "Settled Child" (Criança Assentada) emerges as an ethical and epistemological operator that questions hegemonic models and normative ideals of the "Universal Child," highlighting the intersectionalities of race, class, and territoriality. Aiming to understand the interplay of forces and truths governing the bodies of children in situations of social vulnerability, I sought to explore, through intervention-research, the relationship between the children and the settlement territory, as well as the community actions that built coping strategies against rights violations in the neighborhood's vicinity. The methodological approach is based on cartographic intervention-research, involving participation in the institutional daily life of the NGO "ABC do Glória," individual clinical sessions with one child, and the conduction of "Play Groups" with eight children residing in the neighborhood. Field diaries, photographic records, and the construction of "spoken maps" by the children were used as recording instruments, allowing for the cartography of the neighborhood based on symbolic categories such as danger, fun, and care. The data produced during the research reveal that the territory acts as a subjectivity operator, where material precariousness and urban exclusion produce the logic of sociopolitical suffering. The dissertation encompasses the following axes of analysis: a) structural racism and socio-spatial inequality mark the bodies and discourses enunciated by the children; b) playing as a discursive act and form of resistance, highlighting children as producers of culture and occupants of public and political spaces in the city; c) the community production of an informal care network, composed of neighbors, Indigenous, and religious leaders, which sustains life in the face of the failure of public institutions. Finally, this work supports the recognition of childhood as a geopolitical category, and asserts that the listening device in the territory, supported by psychoanalysis, reaffirms the child as a political subject capable of influencing and transforming the social bond.