How it All Began::Developing a Collaborative Inquiry into Learning, Marginality and Change

This chapter introduces our collaborative project, born from workshops that brought Danish and Brazilian researchers together in Belo Horizonte (2015) and in Copenhagen (2017). It has evolved further through years of dialogic exchanges and shared theoretical exploration of research on learning from the perspective of the learners and from marginalized positions and communities. As the chapters of the book took shape, they created the scope of the book project focused on urban life and struggles concerning marginality, conflicts and inequalities. We chose to work together in part to explore how our national, theoretical, and methodological traditions both inspire and limit the research we do, as we seek answers to questions about ‘what learning is for’ in struggles for social change and social justice. The introduction highlights how the collaborative process itself became a form of learning, shaping our theoretical development in dialogue with each other and with the ethnographic studies