Focar aqui dentro, (não) esquecer lá fora: afetos e formas de habitar o cotidiano em uma unidade socioeducativa de internação no Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The current ethnography traverses the means by which young people foster ways of dwelling in the daily life of deprivation of liberty when within a socio-educational regime of custody. In this regard, it explores the different fashions of agency of these actors fabricated amidst fear and mistrust, taking the affects as the guiding thread of the narrative. This work was carried out through a series of 10 workshops with two groups of youngsters held in Don Bosco Socio-educational Center, a young male confinment unit in Rio de Janeiro. Unfolding from the contemporary debates on detention spaces, which rather than plain institutions, will consider those as flux regulation technologies, policing the traffic of people, objects and artifacts in and out of it’s walls, the goal of this work is to explore how, within these connections and interchanges, the youngsters come up with ways of actually inhabiting the institution. Thus, it first presents the atmosphere of fear and the hostile affects that constitute their everyday life in deprivation of liberty, followed by the ways of which they develop possibilities of existence by securing specific institutional normatives and categories, as well as the ways they set up a “Nóis é coletivo” and produce their own paths inside the institutional space. Inside these circuits they also make entry, assembling some institutional actors as communicating vessels between inside and outside, some objects and mediators that transport them to their lives outside the facility. This way, they recreate fragments of that life inside the institute, producing an infrastructure network in a precarious scenario; simultaneously transporting themselves outside without actually leaving the institution. We accompany the ways in which young people cope with the fear, in favor of and against it, in order to make life livable in confinement, serving as inspiration for this text to be a form of writing against fear.