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Between the remnants of colonialism and the insurgence of self-narrative in constructing participatory social maps: towards a land education methodology.

This article summarizes a social mapping project conducted by the EnvironmentalEducation, Communication and Arts Research Group from the Federal Universityof Mato Grosso. The primary goals of the project were to map the vulnerablesocial groups of Mato Grosso, and identify the social and environmental conflictsthat put them in situations of risk. The conflicts and dilemmas these groupsexperience are typically caused by land and water disputes. In turn, the disputescan be traced to the continuance of colonialist forms of political, economic andecological relations implicit in the prevailing model of development in the region.Supported by the reinvention and application of a new methodology forenvironmental education, namely the social map, the work illustrates the signifi-cance of group identities, self-narratives and interpretive frames, and discusseshow social mapping might be used in land education to enable the construction ofparticipatory forms of public policy.