Without ignoring the persistence of the most remote forms of articulation between intellectuals and favelas in Rio de Janeiro, this article deals with the type of articulation that has predominated in the city since the 1980s, with the country s redemocratization, and especially nowadays, under reconfiguration of favela movements and the entrance democratization to public universities. The main argument is that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a process of inflection regarding the place occupied by the university in the production of knowledge, making it become, at the center of that production, part of socio-technical networks that generate scientific knowledge in close articulation with favela collectives organizations. To better characterize the point, the article mentions a specific case involving the articulation of a network around Covid s coping plan in the favelas.