This paper presents the results from action research that addressed female smoking in community spaces. The proposal originated from dialogue between the conceptual and methodological fields relating to feminism and popular education and aimed to pick out and gain an understanding of subjective and objective issues relating to female smoking, both in the family and in the social community spheres. In this action research, six women who were former smokers and were living in a community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, were trained to develop an educational process that reached women, men, adolescents and children in the form of dialogue and participation. The results revealed how to build shared knowledge on health, resulting from integration of academic and popular knowledge through dialogic educational praxis, thereby confirming the potential of this proposal for coping with female smoking in such contexts.
Smoking; Gender identity; Popular education; Action research