Countryside education on the edge of the “strip”: place (in)existence as phenomenon of spacialisation

[Original Title: "Educação do Campo à beira da 'Faixa': A (in)existência do lugar como espacialização do fenômeno"] This essay engages an ongoing research on the production and experience of places along the edge of the Transamazon Highway (BR-230), Pará, Brazil. Against the dominant framing of the road as an engineering system — a means of flow and territorial occupation — I propose to think it as an everyday living space, foregrounding the educational dimension as a privileged entry point for understanding the (in)existence [(in)existência] of places. The central aim is to examine the spatial imagination underlying external representations of the Transamazon in educational policy and planning, and to set it against the unique geographicity produced by local groups who live alongside the road. Methodologically, I draw on a phenomenological-existential approach, combining fieldwork, literature review on spatial imagination, place and rural education, and critical reading of official Ministry of Education documents — in dialogue with the self-representations of those who inhabit the edge of the "Strip." Three preliminary findings are proposed: (1) the denial of places as a geopolitical strategy materialized in educational processes and planning; (2) the inescapable geographicity of communities that recognize themselves — and relate contradictorily — to the Transamazon Highway; (3) Rural Education [Educação do Campo] as either an opening or a denial of place — for those who live it and for those who do not — which can operate as a factor of widespread ignorance about Amazonian spatiality, or as a site of confrontation and creation of new geographical and cartographic knowledge about the places cut by the "Strip."