As an initiative of the Rio Branco Chair at the Brazil Institute, the Rio Branco Chair at the Brazil Institute invited participants from the collaborative project UNIR - the Rocinha Favela Research and Knowledge Production Centre at PUC-Rio, presented the online interactive and geo-referenceable portal of UNIR, which arose as an important result from the articulation between the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and multiple partner organisations from Rocinha, Brazil's largest favela.

At the colloquium, the debate focused on the role of knowledge-data policies in peripheral territories as a political act to affirm insurgent citizenship, drawing on concrete experiences in the favelas of Rocinha and Maré in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilândia in São Paulo.

The purpose was to understand how horizontal socio-technical networks can be strengthened and made viable through international inter-institutional partnerships.

In the following theme, we explore new strategies for territorial co-production emerging in favelas and peripheries in Brazil, as a mobilisation in defense of democracy and an insistence on discussing the city as the place of the common. This movement has been driven by the expanding access to public universities of students from the periphery and has significantly enhanced the dialogue between universities and NGOs working in the favelas.

it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is above all from these peripheral territories that the most vigorous struggle in defense of democracy and the city itself.

In this process, the way in which this struggle affects the very place of universities as a source of producing science and authorized knowledge is particularly important. This theme debates these issues and is highly relevant to anyone with an interest in informal and peripheral settlements in Brazil or other countries in the Global South.