Lazer e decolonialidade no Ruas de Lazer em Pelotas/RS

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the extent to which the extension project Ruas de Lazer, based on its 2024 edition held in the Navegantes neighborhood and organized by the Federal University of Pelotas, expresses decolonial traits in its practices, discourses, and articulations, thereby challenging hegemonic narratives about leisure, territory, and belonging. The study approaches leisure as a social right, a human need, and a dimension of culture. It is situated within the field of critical and insurgent epistemologies, drawing upon decolonial and intersectional perspectives. The first article, based on a literature review, mapped academic productions that articulate leisure and decoloniality, highlighting the emergence of a research field committed to situated knowledges and to the valorization of popular, Indigenous, Black, quilombola, and peripheral cultural manifestations. The analysis reveals a shift in leisure studies, which increasingly demand alternative epistemologies and methodologies, many rooted in orality, ancestry, corporeality, and fabulation as legitimate forms of knowledge production. The second article draws on empirical research concerning the 2024 edition of the Ruas de Lazer project, conducted in the Navegantes neighborhood of Pelotas/RS in the aftermath of the floods that devastated the state. In this context, the project was observed as a space of care, expression, and community reception, particularly through the articulation between the university, public authorities, and local residents. Data were produced through direct observation, photographic records, institutional documents, and field diary notes, and were analyzed using Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA). The results reveal both the limits and the potential of the project: on the one hand, the absence of explicit references to markers such as race, gender, and class in institutional documents points to the persistence of colonial silences; on the other hand, certain practices demonstrate experiences of resistance, affect, and re-existence that reconfigure the meanings of leisure. The research proposes an understanding of leisure as a territory of symbolic, political, and epistemic dispute, and of the Ruas de Lazer actions as possible practices of political fabulation. By listening to the knowledges and bodies emerging from the margins, the project is recognized not as essentially decolonial, but as a contested space.