Dancing Community Social Psychology: Revisiting P.A.R. from a Belly Dancing Course in a Local Cultural Society

Abstract

Since March 2008, I have been in the artistic – community work of a cultural society in a slum in Londrina (Brasil), teaching belly dancing to five community leaders and, recently, to other young women too. This text was supposed to be a psycho-social analysis of this process, but it has been so rich that it inspired the opposed movement: to revisit and alterate the Participatory Action-Research, which is the methodological proposal used in Community Psychology practices.  This review was done based on what the dance students taught me, on dance and on Peter Spink`s work, which defends the importance of everyday life and reconstructs how could be the research and action in Social Psychology.  I propose a libertarian social psychology, grounded in the body and based in everyday life, and following Haraway´s situated knowledge epistemological proposal (Haraway, 1995).