2. Critical Geography: From the Office to the Streets

In the 1970s, with the approach of the theoretical contribution of the social sciences, Brazilian Geography consolidated the discourse of a critical geography, defending the renewal of an epistemological model based on Marxist approaches, emphasizing the concept of space as a central analytical geographical category, to give rise to a New Geography which revealed itself as a symptom of the crisis: the crisis of teaching and of research; the crisis of university; the sociopolitical crisis. The commitment to renewal arose in the context of the discontent of geographers who voiced criticisms/complaints against the hegemonic discourse of theoretical geography. We highlight that its theoretical foundations were solidified in a Marxist-structuralist perspective. In the writings of that time, we observe the absence of the fundamental principles of the ontology of social being as a structuring of the interpretation of the objective reality. In Brazil, almost 50 years after that movement, a chorus of voices rang out in defense of critical geography in a historical context of tension and the militarization of society. The crisis marked a period of confinement for bodies and minds. Reacting became a necessity, which materialized in the Association of Brazilian Geographers (AGB).This has become the focus of geography’s discourse with society, which headed out onto the streets once and for all, even with the passing of the years, particularly in the nineties, with the clash of theoretical and epistemological differences, from the critics of the critics, and even from some of its formulators. This argument is supported by our analysis, because we understand that, in terms of mediation, space is the place and medium of social practice (of the reproduction of relationships of production), from which and within which geographers expect to unveil their contradictions and constitute strategies and political instruments, where the street is the concrete objective reality of knowing how to think/change and give meaning and significance to geography(ies).