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Favelas in RJ state are often located on hills, which served as refuge for enslaved people - after the abolition of slavery (1888) - and immigrants, who worked for downtown citizens. The Law of lands (1850) prevented unoccupied lands to be owned through labour and provided government subsidies for the arrival of foreign settlers to be hired in the country, further devaluing the work of black men and women. As a result, favelas today are mostly composed of a black population, surviving decades of persecutions and low incomes while defending, preserving and creating a unique culture rooted in African origins that reverberates into music and the arts. Children in favelas, due to social and economical inequality and racial discrimination, have less possibility of personal development and professional realization. They attend public schools where in 2021, according to SAEB, students do not reach a satisfactory level in Portuguese language (69%) and math (95%).

They hardly have access to after-school courses and do not tend to see themselves represented in the academic community. This produces a disadvantage in access to higher education and consequently in opportunities for decent employment. The project Closer to the Sky aims at co-producing scientific knowledge in collaboration between astronomers and artists/educators living in the favela of Cantagalo Pavão Pavdosinho (PPG, RJ, Brazil), for children, teenagers and young adults of the community. We will work in close collaboration with the social project Ninho das Aguias, where classes and night sky observations will be held.
Offering extracurricular courses and cultural experiences to students in the PPG, we wish to enrich their school curriculum and strengthen the chance they wish to stay in education after secondary school. A key element of the courses is providing positive role models of scientists from Afrodescendant backgrounds, reinforced by the presence of local artists and educators, thus endorsing their role within the academic community. The project also creates just work opportunities for local artists and educators, who will offer workshops rooted in favela culture, while at the same time creating novel, decolonial courseware based on contextualized science, i.e materials that use the context of marginalized societies as examples where we can understand, learn and make science. The material developed within the project will be shared as Open Educational Resources in several languages.

Barbosa Araujo, Claudio Alberto. 2023. "Closer to the Sky." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science, Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Despite the current level of development of communications, which has managed to connect distant geographies in high quality of image and sound, the possibility of traveling and seeing people and places is still an amazing experience. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the crisis that the aviation and tourism industry experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of flights has increased today. However, these trends are in contrast to the climate crisis scenario in which air mobility appears as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore worth asking, what factors sustain this scenario and invite us to continue to prefer aircraft as a means of transportation? While the reasons for traveling are multiple, there is one central element: the fascination that exists behind travel. This fascination seems to be a constituent part of the human being, driven by the desire to overcome our limitations and soar through the skies in search of new latitudes. But this fascination is also driven through a collective imaginary that has been built and sustained, starting with the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and continued with countless references in popular culture that make us look to the skies and let ourselves be carried away by those desires to have wings and fly. Something that is even deeper in a country like Chile and in a city like Santiago, so far from the rest of the world and flanked by the Andes Mountains, where flying seems to be the only way to expand our borders. It is this imaginary, which seems to raise few controversies in the country, that faces the future that the aviation industry offers us, one that promises to populate our skies with different types of flying artifacts, in an image that however does not seem alien, since it has been fueled by science fiction, becoming established as the obvious path to follow. In the face of this scenario, one of the biggest questions that arises is how this reconfiguration of the skies that the aviation industry promises will be inserted within a climate crisis scenario like the one we live in, in which phenomena such as the change in the migratory patterns of birds appears as a real danger to this imaginary and that already worries the world of aviation. These are the questions that hide an imaginary as powerful as the one that the image I have chosen suggests, and in whose development Chile and its hydrogen have a lot to say and a lot to reflect on. 

Catalán Hidalgo, René. 2023. "(Mis)controlling the Atmosphere: Aeromobility-Meteorology Symbiosis, Implications and Unforeseen Consequences." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.