The Discourse of Collective Affirmation about COVID-19 pandemic life experiences in the São Remo favela

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Discourse of Collective Affirmation (DCA) as a participatory research tool, showcasing its application in understanding and documenting pandemic living experiences within a favela. The resulting DCA, composed of texts and photographs provided by residents, contextualizes the pandemic, illustrates community care practices, highlights challenges faced by children and adolescents, and examines the benefits and difficulties of living with other-than-human animals. By incorporating residents’ texts and images into a discourse that they reviewed and approved, the process expanded the repertoire for understanding pandemic living experiences while facilitating the production of affirmative, informative, and advocacy-oriented material.