Focus Area
Social History
Adopting the basic assumptions of social history means developing interpretative procedures that enable the study of the ways in which individuals constitute their ways of life. It is understood that culture is made in the experience of everyday confrontations, in tensions and conflicts, in socially generated consensus and dissent, in creations and appropriations developed as tactics and strategies of power. In this way, culture is not simply a “scheme of perception” that results from or is governed by timeless determinations or abstract logics. Culture is understood to be made as the fabrics of social life are experienced.
Between change and permanence, cultural configurations are practices that are constituted in movements and situations involving power relations, such as: thoughts, ideas, feelings, reciprocities, interests, legitimacies, traditions, expectations, narratives, family and kinship organisations, work relations, exercises of domination and resistance, needs and values. If the relationships that human beings establish among themselves and with nature are created and recreated as compositions of meaning, as languages, we understand that social and political aspects cannot be separated from other aspects of human existence, such as their ideas and beliefs.
It’s about trying to understand, through the configuration of research objects and thematic sections, a whole set of social practices linked to historical structures and experiences, focusing on the specificities of historical sources and developing specific procedures for interpreting them. This means that the act of research must stimulate a continuous reflection on theory as the organising principle of knowledge. In this sense, social history presupposes a constant critical activity on the ways in which traces of the past are transformed into historical sources. The construction of sections on social experience necessarily involves methodological criteria that need to be made explicit and evaluated in relation to the possibilities of (re)constructing knowledge. What is at stake, then, is not only the outcome of research, but how the articulations that generate the writing of history itself become possible.
In this way, the area of concentration in Social History takes as its starting point the problematisation of the experiences of historically situated subjects, without neglecting the very historicity of these concepts, understanding that it is essential to recognise that the concepts of the social, the subject and history have trajectories, are not categories outside of time, and are therefore part of the disputes through which ways of understanding the past have been established. Underlying these assumptions, it is necessary to consider cultural fabrics as constructions linked to the workings of memory, which, based on a complex interplay of social forces, are involved in webs of memory and forgetting.
