The Pontos de Cultura are grassroots organizations that utilize art forms to promote identity formation and creative expression, often within some of Brazil's poorest rural regions and urban slums. Art and popular art forms (capoeira, Caribbean-style steel drumming, street theater, hip-hop, radio programming) are the program's necessary tools, but they are part of a process that is explicitly conceptualized as community development and which involves ideas of political mobilization and engagement.

Professor Candace Slater’s research focuses on individual Ponto de Cultura's definitions of terms such as "tradition," "popular culture" and "citizenship"-all of which are central to the Ministry of Culture's rhetoric about the program. Through fieldwork with these community centers, she examines how the terms are defined by individual members of the different Pontos, and how they play out in everyday practice. A key question is, "What is the relationship between the often openly "traditional" art forms on which many of the Pontos focus and contemporary social change?"

As a way into these questions she chose three distinct Pontos in different parts of the Northeastern state of Cear, and employed six Berkeley undergraduates to work in collaboration with each other and these Pontos. Students worked in Berkeley and in Brazil, concluding with a group meeting at one of the Pontos during the first week of August 2007, and a 20-25 page research paper.