By Eduarda Santos Costa (PIBIC Scholarship holder, process number 2024_1071)

Psychology, having developed within colonial contexts, carries with it the colonial responses to encounters with different ways of being human.

This undergraduate research project seeks to bring Indigenous conceptions, practices, and environments into the broader discourse on health and well-being. It focuses on analyzing the tensions that arise within the Indigenous Network, drawing from a range of materials and engaging with intersecting fields such as psychology, public health policy, philosophy, anthropology, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

The project is part of the broader initiative titled “Indigenous Network: conceptions, practices, and environments for health and well-being” (FAPESP process no. 22/04906-3). Its objective is to deepen the understanding of how different communities—Indigenous and academic—conceive, practice, and experience health and well-being. Through a dialogical analysis of the Network’s documentation from 2012 to 2021, the study maps these conceptions and explores the relationships and dialogues that shape them.

The Network’s service has provided formative experiences through university outreach programs, fostering reflections on the urgent transformation of Psychology by incorporating non-European traditions, such as Indigenous ones.

The Network was created in 2012 to address the need for including Indigenous conceptions, practices, and environments in the territory of academic scientific knowledge. These needs, emphasized by international Indigenous movements, resonate with Indigenous leaders’ concerns about the exploitation of their knowledge by researchers not committed to the well-being of people and communities. In response to this discomfort expressed by Indigenous interlocutors, the creation of a university outreach project (rather than a research project) was the ethical solution to avoid tensions with the involved communities. Thus, the Indigenous Network was born.

Currently, the Network operates actively as a service based in the Department of Experimental Psychology at USP’s Institute of Psychology. It has expanded its academic community relations by involving professors, students, and volunteers from various fields. It has also extended its connections with Indigenous peoples across all regions of Brazil and built partnerships with international Indigenous networks and communities.

The selected data for analysis are public records of the Network’s actions: projects, reports, audiovisual event recordings, and other ethically unrestricted materials. Since the Network has always aimed to engage with the community through outreach projects, and not through research, the products of those activities now become the focus of a study aimed at understanding the dialogical tensions that have shaped transformations in health and well-being conceptions, practices, and environments throughout the Network’s history.

The selection and organization of public records followed the criteria of open access and explicit connection to the Network. The methodological approach views communication as a situated event, considering the speaker and listener positions, and includes content and expressive analysis. It also integrates elements from integrative reviews and dialogical discourse analysis.

The research aims to identify relationships among health and well-being conceptions, practices, and environments through the following analyses:

Result 1: Identification of prior understandings of health and well-being among project researchers, based on the questions: Who says what? To whom? When/where?

Result 2: Analysis of the constitutive dialogism among the statements in the complete body of public records from the Network.

Result 3: Analysis of internal dialogism within documents, observing breaks in regularity, expressive positions, gaps, and creative reinterpretations of the narrator’s meanings. This includes comparisons of multiple recorded perspectives and group discussions with the Network team.

Result 4: Understanding dialogical tensions between perspectives across spatial (transversal) and temporal (longitudinal) dimensions, tracking changes in conceptions, practices, and environments over the Network’s trajectory.

Result 5: Drafting of a protocol for the Network’s academic practices with Indigenous communities, based on the systematization of insights emerging from the documents and discussed with the research team and Indigenous interlocutors.

The adopted procedures enable a dialogical exchange where the research community engages as part of the cultural and outreach space, respecting its specificities. Simultaneously, the academic team shares its reflections based on the analyzed documentation, ensuring a participatory knowledge-building process. This facilitated flow of knowledge is one of the main objectives of the research.

Our goal is to address the health and well-being practices present in the Network’s actions and understand how we can preserve and expand them, building a Psychology that is responsive to Indigenous issues.