AN ETHNOGRAPHY AT SCHOOL: BODY-TERRITORY DYNAMICS AMONG HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Body-Territory; School Ethnography; Artistic Practices; Experience; Education.
This research conducts an ethnography at the Passo da Pátria Full-Time State School, focusing on the artistic practices of high school students—such as zine drawings, collages, slams, posters, and performances. The central objective is to understand how these productions operate as languages that reframe educational pathways, analyzing the aesthetic and political elements they mobilize within the school's daily life. The study first seeks to comprehend the mutual influences between the school environment and students' cultural creations, taking social interactions and bodily experiences as key observational axes. It then investigates how these dynamics of creation and learning broaden discussions on the body, articulating anthropology, experience, and education. Finally, it analyzes the use of the body-territory category as an analytical tool to interpret the processes of subjectivation, resistance, and transformation emerging from artistic-cultural practices within the school space. The methodology is based on participant observation (Guber, 2001), ranging from activities within an extension project to field diary records, also incorporating visual records and interviews. Drawing on the categories of body-territory (Miranda, 2014; 2020; 2025), experience (Bondìa, 2002), and aesthetic-bodily knowledge (Gomes, 2017), the study demonstrates that students' artistic productions constitute forms of creative and political agency, enabling the (re)territorialization of identities and negotiation with school norms. It further argues that university extension, conceived as an aesthetic-political practice, constitutes a fundamental space for mediating and enhancing these processes, resisting neoliberal logics in education.