Information and public safety: the construction of social knowledge in community environment

Abstract

The research reported here had the objective to describe the process of social knowledge construction in community environments. The focus of inquiry was centered in the “informational practices” on public safety that took place in a Community Counsel of Public Safety in Belo Horizonte (MG), which was considered as a site for search, use, mediation and construction of information. Treated as a social construction and studied using resources of the human and social sciences, as proposed by the “anthropology of information”, which considers that the unfolding of informational processes can only be understood within a cultural context, an attempt was made to identify the variety of information exchanged, the meaning they take on for the participants and the diversity of points of view they justify and legitimate. Based on the theory of social fields, the “symbolic disputes” were observed, and, with the intention to produce a “thick description” as proposed by the interpretive anthropology, a hermeneutic dialect perspective was used, as a means of articulating the comprehension (consensus) and critique (conflict) to understand the social reality. The results showed evidences in different manners to conceive public safety, and that information, a way to communicate experiences, is the object of disputes that configured a specific “informational field”. Diverse informational poles get into conflict generating difficulties to share information, a condition which was named “informational emptiness”.