narratives of a “sentipensante” extension

crossroads paths are not resolved in the air

Abstract

This article is part of a sequence of narratives that compose the fabric of a “sentipensante” university outreach, built through walks, encounters, and affective experiences in a working-class territory in the town of Petrópolis, state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Taking the crossroads as a category of experience, we reflect on the ethical commitment that emerges from the encounter with the territory, understood as a living space traversed by histories, affections, and relationships. The crossroads does not appear as a place of immediate decision, but as a space of suspension, listening, and maturation of the extensionist gesture. The text presents the methodology of “sentipensante” outreach as a way of walking, listening, and being in the territory, in which feeling and thinking are intertwined in the production of knowledge. We reflect on the notion of cartography of encounter, understood as a sensitive mapping woven by affections, everyday gestures, and events that insist on happening. Walking, from this perspective, means allowing oneself to be affected, letting the territory to cross the body and disrupt certainties. Between imposing and paralyzing, we inhabit the ethical fissure in which presence, care, and responsibility become political action. “Sentipensante” outreach thus affirms itself as a methodological crossing, a formative practice, and a commitment to life that resists.