Research areas
1. Art, Image and Culture
This area has as a theoretical and research premise to focus on the forms of cultural expression and social relations in specific contexts. Approached themes include the production, circulation and reception of image, arts and cultural practices in their different areas (such as movies, photography, performance, dance, music, theater, visual arts, literature and patrimonial preservation) while focusing on conflicts as well as on their heuristic potentiality for the field of Social Sciences.
Professors: Clarice Ehlers Peixoto, Joana D’Arc do Valle Bahia, Marcos Albuquerque, Maria Raquel Passos Lima e Myrian Santos
2. City, Power and Resistance
This research area gathers projects that use the ethnographic perspective to understand state practices that act on territories and populations through institutions, public administration agents and management devices. It is also of interest to this area the resistance, resilience and persistence performed by agents (especially those in social asymmetry situations permeated by social markers such as race, social class, gender, religion and nationality), be them organized in political collectives or not.
Professors: Joana D’Arc do Valle Bahia, Lia de Mattos Rocha, Marcia Leite, Maria Josefina Gabriel Sant´Anna, Maria Raquel Passos Lima, Paula Mendes Lacerda, Patrícia Birman, Roberta Sampaio Guimarães, Sandra Maria Corrêa de Sá Carneiro
3. Culture, Subjectivity and Emotions
This research area gathers projects that examine the limits and possibilities of the construction of emotions as an object of study for the social sciences. The projects explore the emotional dimension of phenomena in two ways: those connected to private life such as health, body and family life issues, and those connected to the public life such as the engagement on social movements and forms of victimization.
Professors: Claudia Barcellos Rezende, Maria Claudia Coelho, Vinicius Kauê Ferreira e Waleska Aureliano
4. Family, Gender and Generations
This research area gathers projects that analyze family transformations and behaviours and their intergenerational reflexes as well as studies about sexuality and gender social relations. Family, generation, gender and sexuality are treated both as the base for social identities and as an axis of contemporary forms of inequality.
Professors: Clara Araújo, Clarice Ehlers Peixoto, Claudia Barcellos Rezende, Maira Covre-Sussai, Paula Lacerda and Waleska Aureliano
5. Intellectuals, Education and Politics
Gathered in this research area are professors who have academically invested in themes related to the crossing of Social Sciences with the following areas: intellectual trajectories, militancy, policies elaboration and education. The interlocutionary space is amplified in all these fronts by theoretical reflection and empirical research about the interface of Social Sciences with literature, politics, biographies and education.
Professors: Fernando Weltman, Helena Bomeny, Valter Sinder e Vinicius Kauê Ferreira
6. Religions, sociabilities and cultural forms of expression
This area is constituted by researchers that approach the effects of the presence of religious activities, groups, rituals or symbols in diverse contexts as well as its role on networks of social action and its expressive dimensions. It includes the fields that exceed the “religious” toponymy and that make it possible to think of it not only as a set of phenomena but also as a native and analytical category.
Professors: Cecilia Mariz, Joana D’Arc do Valle Bahia, Marcia Contins, Marcia Leite, Patrícia Birman, Sandra Maria Corrêa de Sá Carneiro
7. Violence, Citizenship and Public Politics
This area gathers a set of projects dedicated to studying the factors that play a role in the incidence of different violence modalities and in the socially differentiated access to rights. In this perspective there is a special interest in the analysis of national and international policies focused on the decreasing of violence, on the qualification of public security and on the expansion of access to rights.
Professors: Bernardo Ferreira, Clara Araújo, Doriam Borges, Eduardo Ribeiro, Fernando Lattman-Weltman, Ignácio Cano, João Trajano Sento-Sé, Maira Covre-Sussai, Myrian Sepúlveda, Paulo D´Avila, Roberta Soromenho Nicolete.
8. State, Politics and Representation
The convergence of two fields of studies of institutional politics is what characterizes the work dynamics of this area. Investigations about agenda building processes with emphasis on media and public spheres of opinion formation are developed. From a strictly institutionalized perspective, the formation of interest and identity groups for the construction of agendas in the field of political representation is investigated. There is special interest on the state and municipal legislative houses as well as on the observation of actions taken by different minorities such as women, people of color and those residing in poor areas of the cities. Both perspectives have a especial interest on tensions and meaning contests that constitute competition for representative legitimacy.
Professors: Bernardo Ferreira, Clara Araújo, Doriam Borges, Fernando Lattman-Weltman, Paulo D´Avila, Paulo Henrique Paschoeto Cassimiro.
9. Social Theory
This area gathers strictly theoretical researches in which the discussions and analyses are focused exclusively on the conceptual architecture that can be identified in texts of different kinds: sociological, anthropological, political, philosophical, and literary, amongst others. What bring together the projects included in this area is therefore the option for bibliographical investigation rather than eventual disciplinary or epistemological affiliations. The area also include projects dedicated to what has come to be known as Brazilian social thought.
Professors: Bernardo Ferreira, Helena Bomeny, João Trajano Sento-Sé, Maria Claudia Coelho, Paulo D´Avila, Paulo Henrique Paschoeto Cassimiro, Ronaldo Oliveira de Castro e Valter Sinder.