For two years, twelve interdisciplinary critical ethnographers developed a research project with two communities situated in Costa de Caparica (Portugal) called Urban Boundaries Project (UBP) – supported by a national institution (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) and based at the Institute of Education, Lisbon University. The UBP emerged as an alibi to a group of people to be together in a “legal” way. This group was constituted by academics, fisherman, and residents of an illegal settlement brought together in the struggle against local politics, which has maintained a policy of fear and sadistic enjoyment. The three scientific tasks proposed by the UBP (Critical Alphabetization, Multiple Cartography, Histories of Life) were developed by members of the three communities and are nothing more than “scientific doors” to claim: WATER in the illegal settlement; VOICE to the fishing community; and our rights to exercise an EMANCIPATORY EDUCATION. This paper brings together disturbing choices made within the communitarian educational processes lived in this project, which invited all its social actors to recognize that “the dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny “ (Freire, 1981, p.30).