João França
I was born in Brasilia in 1990 and in 2001 I arrived to Barcelona. I studied Humanities at the Pompeu Fabra University and in the summer of 2011 I entered the world of journalism with an internship at the newspaper Público. The first press conference I attended was one of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform of People Affected by Mortgages), and this turned out to be one of the realities to which I most devoted myself. What has stuck me to journalism was the possibility of telling stories of struggles for a better world.
Until 2017, my career was closely linked to daily basis journalism, as reporter and finally coordinator of the newsroom of the Plural Journalism Foundation, and since then I have worked as a freelance journalist in a variety of written and audiovisual projects.
Among the issues that most concern me there are social movements, housing, the right to the city, gender and LGBTI issues or migration. In 2021 I got a master’s degree in Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Barcelona, with a research project on daily journalism.
Photo: Sònia Calvó Carrió.
Barcelona
Since 2001 I have been a neighbour of the city of Barcelona, which seems to me a special place from where to look at the world. This city is a global benchmark in terms of urban transformation and citizen resistance.
El Raval
My house is in the Raval district, which has always been a place of arrival and has given shelter to what the city has wanted to exclude. It is also a space that has suffered particularly aggressive urban policies that did not put the lives of neighbors in the foreground. The Raval is a paradigm of the urban conflicts that confront capital and life nowadays around the world.