A master thesis about "Self Determined Participatory Action of Marginalized Groups: The streets of São Paulo" published under cc-by-sa 3.0 Germany licence.

This work emerged out of a six month empirical stay in São Paulo, Brasil. In a sense this thesis is to a certain extend a rhizomatic map, consisting of many points and tracings, without fixed start and end, without a hierarchical order. This work aims to provide an insight, even though just as a scratch on the surface, to the life and struggle on the streets of São Paulo.

At the same time this work is part >of< and not an analysis >about< social movements. It is not intended to report about coping strategies of marginalised groups but about the discourse, the dreams and the difficulties that apparently seem to be inherent to a social praxis beyond discrimination and oppression.

This thesis tries to do this by narrating insights and experiences, as diaries, from the standpoint of the streets and not science. This work itself is also subject to its own research. It is asking about the meaning and the production of knowledge, how it is perceiving knowledge, how knowledge can be made accessible and reclaimable by all of us, how it can be produced without exploiting others, together and not for the sole profit and benefit of just a few.

Action Research is its mode of action, its knowledge is partial, Open Access is its principle of knowledge distribution. Eventually this work is curious to learn more, from the streets and from theory. It would like to know more about the Right to the City, a term it often run across in São Paulo and elsewhere. It would like to know more about genuine participation, about the idea of politics and the police, the partition of the sensible, about the idea of maximal difference and the city as the space of all those differences, of genuinely taking part in its social production.

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