Health practices in contexts of vulnerability and neglect of diseases, people and territories: potentialities and contradictions in health care for homeless people

Abstract

This article is anchored on the premise that the relationship between public policies, vulnerability, human suffering and neglect of people and territories deserves to be questioned and better understood. One of its main assumptions is the bet on dialogues bridges in the production of health knowledge, through different frames of reference - biomedical paradigm; social determination of health; social vulnerability; decolonial contributions. It is the result of a study dedicated to monitor health practices in neglected and vulnerable areas in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, especially to people living in precarious houses and homeless people. Different encounters and ways of taking life, in the making of possible daily life, were experienced. These encounters provided elements for the understanding of health as a social value in concrete situations, bringing into question, under various readings, the vulnerability of human lives. There is talk, therefore, of critical readings about ways of being in the world, dialogically related to historical, political and social conditions, in which lies the bet on resistance and daily actions of various social actors and innovative health devices that have potential in the making of anti-hegemonic practices.