PRAXIS IN COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY: SÃO JOÃO FESTIVAL AS COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the organization of São João festival in Canafístula (Ceará) as a communitarian activity from the theory of Community Psychology. This process happens by developing community activities which are group actions based on dialogic, democratic and cooperative attitudes towards communitarian and personal purposes. These actions can promote awareness process, empowerment of personal identity and community identity and local level cooperating. All the work was built in a community center research and development project at a Public University in Ceará in 2011.The team was under graduate and graduate students, a psychology doctor and Canafístula‘s residents. The actions took place on a cooperation process between the students and the householders appreciated and recognized by popular and scientific knowledge. The focus of the project was the cultural action empowerment as the achievement of São João Festival, when the neighborhood’s corporate actions created a network between them and reinforced the sense of community and their particular identities. The method used was the dialogical-experimental in which researchers deeply experience the native situation linked to residents and places while making scientific analyzes about the way-of-living of the community. We can conclude that the accomplishment of the festival can be considered as a community activity, because its planning and managing had as basic principles the dialog and the cooperation as a common objective. The festival development had awareness processes, empowerment of individual and community identity making them to understand and change their reality. A local group of young adults was created with the purpose of reflecting about their community and development as an outcome of this project.