Reflections on cartography from the researcher-phenomenon

redesigning Ouro Preto (MG/Brazil) through an autoethnographic writing

Abstract

In this article, we explore a narrative that privileges the “I” of the phenomenon researcher as a starting point – whose experiences are disorganized and reorganized as he walks through a small previously chosen stretch of the urban space of Ouro Preto (MG/Brazil). Faced with such a frame of experience, a cartography that induces and sustains their reports is imposed, and composes the methodology together with a theoretical path that is based on the field of communication, but that also triggers readings from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history and literature. This makes us raise analytical reflections on the appearance of the cartographic gesture in autoethnographic writing, which allows placing the reader the reader in a social fabric whose realities, sometimes described and sometimes imagined, are as changeable as those who move through the aforementioned urban space.