Culture and Power
The research line produces knowledge around cultural practices that are constituted in the experience of social relations. Subjects’ experiences are approached as a field of conflicts and tensions, marked by various tactics and strategies of power. Working with Culture and Power involves an effort to study the historicity of institutions, organizations, values, customs, beliefs, norms, expectations, traditions, ideas, concepts, ideals, and sensibilities that take shape within the changes and continuities of social life.
It is in this sense that reflections on the specificity of research sources are developed. In this direction, the line encompasses approaches that focus on writings, oralities, and images, considering that, through these languages and particular questions, a fertile field of problematizations opens for investigating social and political experiences.
It is therefore understood that there are specific requirements for developing interpretative procedures that take into account the sites of production, circulation, and consumption, highlighting the historicity of techniques and materials used in the most diverse forms of cultural expression. Research is particularly concerned with the many relationships between orality, writing, and images, and with the ways in which the boundaries between these forms have been constructed under particular circumstances. It is important to work with the diversity of knowledge configurations, not only in institutional or official spaces but also in the multiplicity of knowledge linked to the desires and needs of everyday life.
Another field of interest is the configuration of spaces, approached from a perspective that examines the ways in which subjects construct spatialities, territories, and boundaries, as they experience values and sensibilities intertwined with social tensions. In this regard, there is a broad range of issues involving the countryside, the city, and their multiple relations, such as studies on the imaginaries of (and around) the hinterlands, the memories and sociabilities of urban and rural spaces, or the formation of sacred places, festivals, and other collective manifestations.
