The production and use of inscription within research at a unit caring for children and adolescents at the São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, is discussed. Workshops on maps and photography were proposed, with the aim that the young people could produce a plan with differentiated legitimacy in relation to the existing plans for their hospitalization (medical files and occurrence books). The differences in the production of maps and photographs made it possible to specify the epistemological notion of inscription plans, from which three fields of analysis were established: a position from which to observe the plan, the technical conditions for producing it and the position of such plans in truth games. The need to question the techniques involved in knowledge production was shown, since the use of technical artifacts specifically connects the field of discourse and the material issues that support it.
Photography workshops; Map workshops; Mental health; Research methodology