| Name |
Description |
| Culture and Ethnicity |
This line of study gives emphasis to transdisciplinary works and promotes historical researches whose approaches employ concepts from different fields of human and social sciences. By focusing on the Iberian and American context from the point of view of social relations, shared practices and knowledge, artistic creation and the production of knowledge, this line underlines phenomena proper to modernity and experiences that transcend its own paradigms. Researches developed within this line of study encompass studies on representation, visual culture and ethnicity.
This type of research on culture comprises themes of historical interest, analysed from the perspective of perception, the attribution of meanings and the representation of reality in a particular historical context. Considering the American and Iberian cultural context during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this type of research encompasses the social politics of memory, artistic and intellectual creation in audio, visual and discursive languages, including routes, performances, networks and symbolic exchanges. The configuration of objects in this field tries to reveal historical situations determined according to the universe of beliefs, emotions and knowledge that have given them intelligibility and meaning in their own time.
Research on art, image and visual culture problematize the way the various types of images permeate everyday social life creating the visuality of an era, connecting production techniques and circulation of images to the ways of visualizing the different social groups and spaces, proposing a look at the world, mediating our understanding of reality and suggesting models of social action.
The production within this thematic line includes research on ethnicity that favours the methodological transit and transdisciplinarity between History, Archaeology and Anthropology, and deals with subjects from the pre-colonial period to contemporary research regarding different ethnic groups. Studies aimed at understanding the interethnic contact in the Ibero-American world via its numerous records, focus on the daily life and cultural manifestations of indigenous populations, caboclo and quilombola communities and other peoples on the fringes of pre-colonial and post-colonial history, using epistemological instruments for the development of analysis not restricted to the reductionist dualism of the societies in contact. |
| Politics, Intellectuals and Media |
This line of research emphasises aspects of the formation, development, organization and dissemination of concepts, discourses and political practices, inserted in a historical process and its social context. Its theoretical foundations are specialized literature, mostly of French and Anglo-Saxon origin, that takes into consideration the multiple dimensions of the political universe. This line of study establishes a constant dialogue with the New Political History. The various players (individual, collective and institutional) that move through this multiple universe are the themes of this line of study that concentrates in the intellectuals, the political ideas and its various means and processes of dissemination and social performance. It favours as well those studies devoted to nineteenth and twentieth centuries within an Iberian and American context.
The political centrality of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not hinder the development of research that includes other objects and theoretical discussions; on the contrary, political processes are considered beyond the relationship between State and civil society, which enables the development of research into different political organizations or power structures. The political dimension of the research does not exclude the dialogue between Cultural and Social History and the interface with other fields of historical study. The lines conceptual and methodological frame maintains its traditional interdisciplinary approach and establishes a dialogue with Anthropology, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, Psychoanalysis and Social Communication. Thus the press, political parties, trade unions, public policies, public opinion, intellectuals, ideas, elections, associations, armed conflicts, political movements, engaged cultural production, and institutions are objects of interest to this line of research. |
| Society, Economic Development and Migration |
The present line of research favours studies on urban transformations and the network of contacts and relationships established in different processes of sociability. It uses the latest theoretical and methodological tendencies of social history and proposes a reflection on the varied social, economic and political ties observed in an urban space; it focusses on studies of the paths of groups and/or individuals, their social and territorial insertion and their experiences and displacements.
The identification of the space the different players, through their everyday practices, occupy in society allows the researcher to better understand their contribution in the transformation of cities, companies, industries, arts and crafts, professions and the effects of migration in society as a whole.
Issues related to work should also be a part of the considerations about everyday practices associated to societys economic and industrial development. In this context the role of the immigrant regards to entrepreneurship, technology and the circulation of ideas should be emphasised. Among the themes favoured by this line of research are studies of immigration to Brazil, focussing on transnationalism (economic, cultural and political) and the role of immigrants in the process of urbanization and social modernization of the country between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the history of the press and its relationship with other spaces of intellectual production and the power of society; industrialization, planning and urbanization, emphasising the urban changes promoted by the phenomena of industrialization, the new waves of immigration and other forms of human mobility that occurred throughout the twentieth century.
The social dimension underlined by this line of research does not exclude the dialogue with cultural and political history and the interface with other areas of history. |
