Entre rasgos e remendos: cartografias do trabalho na economia solidária de Volta Redonda/RJ

Abstract

This research investigates the modes of production of subjectivity and health within the context of Solidarity Economy, taking as its empirical field the experience of the Mercado de Pulgas collective in Volta Redonda, Rio de Janeiro. It is a qualitative, cartography-based study grounded in Institutional Analysis and schizoanalysis, in articulation with Canguilhem’s concept of normativity and Indigenous cosmovisions. We aimed to understand how processes of engagement, organization, and invention of ways of life are constituted among the women workers involved in the collective, examining how the group’s dynamics express practices of resistance, care production, and subjectivation in the face of contemporary forms of exploitation, individualization, and precarization of labor. The cartographic methodology allowed us to follow the field in its living processuality, combining field diaries, semi-structured interviews, a restitution workshop, and participant observation in meetings, gatherings, and collective actions promoted by the group. The analysis was structured around analytical maps that explored four main axes: engagement with Solidarity Economy and the institutional tensions shaping collective work; forms of labor organization and the knowledge mobilized; the bonds and affects circulating among workers; and the ways in which this work produces health and sustains life. The results reveal that even within a scenario marked by forces of capture, political erosion, and structural inequality, the group continuously invents solidarity practices that affirm the common, care, and sharing. The Mercado de Pulgas territory emerges not merely as a backdrop but as an active agent of subjectivation, where lines of flight are drawn amidst the contradictions of capitalism. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that Solidarity Economy, far from being only an economic alternative, operates as a field of political formation, strengthening of social bonds, valorization of popular knowledge, and production of health in a broadened sense. The research argues that practices such as those developed by the collective embody a micropolitics of care and self-invention, highlighting the importance of rethinking health and work beyond productivist logics, in dialogue with territories and ways of life engrended within them. By privileging affects, bonds, and collective experimentation as central elements of analysis, this dissertation contributes to the debate on practices of resistance and life production within the fields of Psychology and Public Policy.