Brazilian highway wanderers and the public policies of assistance: social exclusion or risk management strategies?

• Grant number: 15/14331-4
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): October 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal researcher: José Sterza Justo
• Grantee: Eurípedes Costa Do Nascimento
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The wandering in the contemporary is configured as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon in which Brazilian highway wanderers can be taken as one of its more radical examples. They are individuals that travel long distances on foot through the Brazilian highways with a sack on the backs where carry all their belongings, without a certain destination or defined objective. Although they carry their lives histories and the memories of lived experiences in the social fixation niches, their main reference of identify is the stretch, or in other words, the highways where they accomplish their incessant roaming along the year. Data found in our doctoral research reports indicated that public policies of assistance seem to exclude the highway wanderers in its service priorities that focus the street people and the families in situation of risk and vulnerability like populations-targets to be assisted. Aiming to deep the knowledge about this complex contemporary social question, the goal of this postdoctoral research is analyzing the public policies of assistance in relation to the highway wanderers having as axis of analysis the decrees, laws, ordinances, resolutions and normative and operational instructions of Only System of Social Assistance. The method used will the qualitative approach by means of a document research of texts published among the years 2005 to 2012 in the world wide web of the Ministry of Social Development (http://www.mds.gov.br/assistenciasocial/suas). For data analysis will be used the content analysis.