Streetology and Boca de Rua’s Communication Knowledge

Abstract

The article investigates the communication knowledge that emerges from the practices of Jornal Boca de Rua, a newspaper project that for a quarter of a century has been run by a group of homeless people in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in partnership with Alice (Free Agency for Information, Citizenship and Education). From setting the agenda to writing the reports and selling the copies on the streets, all stages involve homeless people, giving Boca de Rua a uniqueness that justifies its study. The main objective is to understand how the communicational knowledge that comes from this experience is formed, along with the constitution of its own sui generis language. To this end, an ethnographic approach is adopted, based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, aiming to capture the routines and perceptions of Boca de Rua journalists about the communication they produce. Ten “intensity zones” are delimited, that structure the group’s functioning, revealing a communication that goes beyond the journalism produced: there is a desire to overcome a socially imposed silencing, but more profoundly, communication is also found in the processes that make this overcoming possible: discussion in circles, collective spaces for speaking and listening, writing processes based on orality, among others. What Boca de Rua shows is a type of communication that is not just in a product (a newspaper), but in the forces that animate change and give new meaning to “homelessness”, reorganizing public spaces and social roles.