Abstract:

This article reports on the advances concerning the main findings of research “Of grassroots subject to a citizen subject to rights and responsibilities —imaginaries and social practices in Cartagena de Indias’ slums”. Those advances have to do with social imaginaries about grassroots subjects and citizens who are subject to rigths and responsibilities. Those imaginaries were created by former inhabitants and community leaders from six slums in the city of Cartagena (Colombia), and were built upon histories, fights, survival mechanisms, and social, cultural, political and economic processes, so that they could be able to establish the processes staying, being transformed, disappearing and appearing in these categorizations or social “labels”, being brought about those same poor sectors and social policies. To do this, both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were followed through discourse analysis and techniques like in-depth interviews, observation and polls.

Keywords: Social imaginaries, social practices, popular subject, citizen subject to rights and responsibilities, slum.