Research Projects
Line 1
Africa-Brazil: political, economic, social, and cultural relations
In recent years, we have witnessed an undeniable intensification of relations between Africa and Brazil, covering an increasing number of areas of activity and involving an equally growing number of professionals. In this process, in addition to traditional economic, social, political, and cultural relations, migratory movements have also experienced new phases, as well as research and teaching on Africa experienced a remarkable development, especially since the teaching of African History and Afro-Brazilian Culture in public and private educational institutions in Brazil, through Law 10.639/2003, became mandatory. It has been a process of several paths and perspectives that it is important to debate, research and analyze, recognizing the importance of the relationship with Africa for the valorization of an important cultural matrix of Brazil and with an increasing relevance for future policies. There will be several questions to be investigated in this project, such as whether to discover if there is a discovery of a “new” Africa resulting from research and teaching of the various realities of the continent. Is there a new perception of the importance of the continent for international relations resulting from this path? Is there a recovery in the dignity of the African in Africa and of his descendants in the diaspora resulting from this teaching? Has this path contributed to influence economic, political, and social relations with the continent? How is this problematic seen from Africa and beyond it? What is the character, weight, and relevance of the new migratory movements between Africa and Brazil? What is the character, weight, and relevance of the new migratory movements between Africa and Brazil? What are the cultural appropriations based on the transit of people, ideas, and cultural goods? How was law 10.639/2003 appropriate in Brazilian schools?
Groups and populations with threatened rights: xenophobia, racism, public policies, and international relations
The project analyzes the social and political practices that constitute territorialities and identities of groups and populations with threatened rights. It intends to understand the action strategies of the State and the forms of action of groups affected through a process of economic and socio-spatial modernization, ethnic-racial minorities, gender, residents in a space of segregation, among others, and the way they form memories and places of belonging. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the socio-political processes and conflicts that took place in Brazil and in the world were fundamental to define rights, build territorialities and establish identity relationships. Parallel to a process of expansion of citizenship, there are several economic, social, and political situations that perpetuate the disillusionment of individuals and groups in societies. Recognizing these actors becomes a central theme in History, Geography, Political Science, Anthropology and Sociology, in different analytical paradigms. Establishing a scope of interdisciplinary analysis, the researches gathered in this project reconstruct different analytical paths that focus on the debate about populations with threatened rights in Brazil and in the world.
Ethnic-racial issues in the dimension of public policies, labor, culture, and intellectual production
The researches in the field of public policy unfolds in several fields of investigation, as in case of projects in the field of health, education, urbanism, populations at risk, gender diversity, ethnic-racial relations, literature, art, territory, and territorialities. The researchers gathered in this project move through all these themes based on projects in the field of social sciences, arts, and philosophy. Such research was organized around public policies and trajectories of intellectuals linked to the sciences, literature, engineering, education, and the arts. Despite the diversity, such investigations have as a point of convergence the study of themes linked to the construction of nations, the diasporas, to the libertarian and liberation movements, and the organization of civil society. We believe that studies in development pose questions that can be better understood when we treat men and women immersed in a sociological, political, and cultural construction, and articulated in sociability networks, in academic, literary, religious, and political circuits.
Line 2
Art as Languages: ways of doing, living, and feeling ethnic-racial identities and belongings
Historically, the socio-historical, political, and cosmological trajectories of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Amerindian, Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean and African groups in Brazil and Latin America constituted diverse artistic modalities and languages, memories, cultural practices, and ways of making and living collectives that constitute identities and ethnic-racial belonging with matrices originating from the black African civilizing legacy. The research project in question deals with the different artistic languages and their facets (music, literature, aesthetics, poetics, gestures, dance, sonority, orality, theatricality) and ways of doing and living (philosophy, religiosity, festive practices, political and cultural associations with an artistic/aesthetic focus, social movements and anti-racist struggle through culture and political culture) to (re)live the diverse Afro-Brazilian ethnic-racial belongings (of race, gender and social class) as specific forms and (re)producers of knowledge from the black African civilizing legacy in the contemporary world. Such proposal permeates the artistic field with an inter and multidisciplinary bias. In this sense, the construction of ethnicities in the culture(s) and art(s) requires interpretive instrumental that lead to paths of thought disseminated in various fields of knowledge, beyond the artistic field itself. In this way, we list relevant theoretical corpus that are configured as powers for the analysis and understanding of the possible territorialities in the long term and in the configuration of subjectivities, anchored in ethnic identities.
Media, narrative, and identity: race and racism in a socio-discursive perspective
The present research project aims to study the socio-historical constructions of race and racism in dialogical relations with texts (oral, written, film, television, imagery, digital, musical, etc.) and in narrative ways of constructing meaning about identities and the social world. Starting from the non-severability between discourse, society and identities, the project focuses on the socio-discursive dimension of the constructs of race and racism, considering that people build their identities in engaging in discursive practices located in history and culture. By engaging discursively, social actors trigger their values, their beliefs, their knowledge systems, their life stories, and their social identities. We cannot, therefore, exempt language and its different forms of expression from its ideological burden, dissociate it from its use, nor ignore the political and ethical effects that emerge from this practice. Likewise, the project focuses on identity practices as an important paradigm for doing research and understanding the social world in contemporary times. Here, it is interesting to study strategies for self-construction and legitimization of meanings in institutions or in everyday life. Certain identity practices are constructed in order to legitimize certain meanings and identities at the expense of others, which causes a silencing and an exclusion of identities said to be different from the normative experience. We believe that focusing on the dynamics of social life, as well as the centrality of discourse, narratives and interactions mediated by texts, allows us to glimpse transformations in society and ruptures in social structures that reproduce injustices and suffering and that perpetuate perverse ways of expressing racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of exclusion.
Racisms, identities, and discourses: construction of meaning and production of subjectivity
This project aims to reflect on repertoires/discourses that approach ethnic-racial issues, from the field of Language Studies, seeking to broaden discussions around the specific problems of the black population and, consequently, contribute to the deconstruction of preconceived ideas regarding the racial stereotype. To this end, we seek the articulation between language practices in different supports, understanding, as Bakhtin (1929/1979), that the other in new dialogical contexts is who makes possible the redefinition of the self. In this way, we hope to be able to contribute with reflections on the modes of production of subjectivity, as well as indicating possible adjustments in the directions in Discourse analysis for analyzes that combine construction of meaning and problematization of social control techniques and forms of expression of resistance (FOUCAULT, 1979, 1996, 2004). Our choice of language practices considers a discursive approach (MAINGUENEAU, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2007), that makes it possible to observe the relationship between texts and surroundings as processes of simultaneous genesis. With regard specifically to racism, an evident social, psychological, affective, cognitive construction, which, therefore, can be unlearned, we spoke with Munanga (2006), Hall (2006), Guimarães (2009) and Fanon (2008, 2013).