A cabeça pensa que sabe, mas é a mão que alembra o caminho

Abstract

This work intends to tension the production of knowledge within universities, disputing narratives based on the stories of women from the Sertanejo countryside that highlight geographies of power on different scales. By bringing together my mother's and grandmother's memories with my own, in a production of knowledge in community, I am trying to make room to establish an epistemological ground and the alliances that I want to strengthen inside and outside the academy. Together we are witnesses of extended temporalities and territorialities - from the 1940s, from small towns in the backlands of Ceará and Piauí, to large Brazilian capitals like Fortaleza, São Paulo, and Salvador. To conduct this research, or let myself be conducted by it, I gathered our memories from the documental and archival material that they contain in themselves and in the various papers, photographic or not, that they kept, composing a collection from the presence, from the encounter, from the body, from orality, and from material fragments that support them. The methodological construction was undisciplined, being traced at each step in an intuitive path led by affections. Methodological deconstructions and epistemological destabilizations are foundational to a work as intimately implicated as this one. And from these migrant memories, I deal with care networks, doings, and daily practices that weave life and exceed the perspective of work, reproductive or not, land rights, and more-than-human territorialities. To understand these issues from the perspective of women from the countryside gives the field of urban studies references to the diversity of ways of making and inhabiting territories in Brazil that have been flattened by the single history and which the canon does not help to understand.