My first experience in the area of adapted sports was dedicated to high-performance, focusing on the Rio de Janeiro Paralympic Games in 2016. After this investigation, I made a brief attempt to accompany two groups that sought to offer possibilities for the interaction of people with disabilities in the context of street racing, which for various reasons did not prosper. Since then, I have directed my interest to the issue of public policies for sport, in particular for the sports practice of people with disabilities.
The first step in this new investigation was to make a survey of all the prefectures of the State of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, identifying which had a specific department for sportive practices. In addition, I sought to identify the activities developed by these departments and if some of them involved people with disabilities.
The data we constructed in this period reinforced my first observation about the rarity of these public policies. Among the ninety-two municipalities of the State of Rio de Janeiro, only two developed activities specifically aimed at people with disabilities and, even in these cases, these were just temporary and covered only a few modalities. Therefore, my research presented one specific difficulty. By defining as a matter of investigation the public policies of sports leisure for people with disabilities, I ended up putting myself to the task of investigating something that did not exist. Starting from this problem, I developed a methodological reflection that I will analyze in this paper, that is, how to research what is not seen, either because - as in the case above - it does not actually exist, or because what is thought to be analyzed cannot, or still cannot, be seen.
