For a sociology of encounter: fieldwork, social positions, and interactional processes in the production of knowledge

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the methodological and epistemological aspects of a research on literary production in the peripheries of São Paulo. By presenting episodes of my fieldwork in “open mic events”, along with the questions raised to me by my interlocutors, I seek, on the one hand, to qualify the way of producing literature and acting of these agents, and on the other hand, to problematize my own positions and my place of speech and writing. This text is also a defense of a reflexive sociology that, while retains its critical objectivity, is at the same time a position taking on social problems and an exercise of encountering and dialoguing with the local and active public. I argue that we need, as sociologists, to be aware on the knowledge erected from material and symbolic struggles against the variety of injustices – including epistemic ones – of all those excluded from the logic of knowledge production.