ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sciences from the Margins: Activist Citizen Science and Colonial Commandment at 2-Torrão Precarious Settlement, Portugal

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 3

English Abstract

Situated on the other coastal margins of the Tagus Estuary, in front of Lisbon city, Trafaria has been, for centuries, a place of the poor and the excluded: the fisherperson, the plague-infested, the criminal and the outcast. Trafaria has a strong geomorphological dynamism, and the coastline either recedes or advances, each year, each decade. In this scenario, community alert systems and technologies to escape the flooding risk were precious local-based knowledge to survive storms and tides. In the 1940s, an unplanned and precarious neighbourhood, called the 2o. Torrão, popped up there, containing fisher stilt houses, improvised huts and precarious summertime houses built by working-class Lisboners. In the 1980s, the neighbourhood came to be a place of refuge of migrants coming from the ex-Portuguese colonies following their independence, especially from Angola and Cape Verde.

By the beginning of the 21st century, most of the local-based knowledge on coastal dynamics was lost. To face this challenge, a project of citizen science was created in 2014 with a group of young neighbours. “Will the sea eat our land?”, they wondered. This was the starting point for a research project developed throughout nine years, counting with the collaboration of oceanographers and coastal geologists as well as local neighbours and fishermen. The conclusion was striking: The floods would be caused by the so-called “licking waves”, and this specific Estuarian dynamics would be of interest worldwide.

In Autumn 2022 the State launched a brutal police and law operation, demolishing houses and displacing families. The mobilization of scientific data and analysis behind this operation was reduced to a “colonial commandment,” in A. Mbembe words. Neglecting all the local knowledge and the activist “citizen science” produced in-site, discourses and knowledge on the global climate change and the sea level rise were used as tactics of fear

Author

• João cão Duarte