Work and Migration
The research line is based on the understanding that labor relations are constituted within a field permeated by power dynamics, in which historically situated subjects create and recreate their traditions, shaping themselves amid changes and continuities, negotiations and conflicts. In this way, work, understood not only as relations of production, concerns the experiences of popular classes in multiple dimensions of life, including protest movements, struggles for social and political rights, cultural expressions, rituals, leisure, and community and family organizations. Within the asymmetrical context experienced by workers, elements of exploitation and domination are found, grounded in the maintenance and reproduction of racism, machismo, and sexism, generating the intersection of inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and territory. Confronting this structural problem, which permeates society, gives rise to manifestations, expressions, and positions that can be characterized as counter-hegemonic, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist.
Studies of these varied themes, linked not only to the institutional forms of organizing work and workers but also to other aspects of class struggles, bring to the realm of everyday life the problem of work as a constitutive dimension of social life. On the other hand, migration and coexistence with different and/or conflicting cultural environments are constitutive elements of the Brazilian social formation and, in particular, that of Ceará, which has been strongly marked by the constant displacement of Indigenous peoples during the colonial period and by forced Atlantic migration that generated the African diaspora, as well as by the migration of poor urban and rural workers, including peasants, with the contradictions arising from disputes over land possession and ownership. The movement of these subjects is inscribed in logics of seeking autonomy, self-determination, and the recognition of rights at different historical moments, including the post-abolition period, culminating in the challenges posed by issues of land possession and maintenance for quilombola and Indigenous peoples, and by policies of access to employment and higher education shaped by affirmative action aimed at historically excluded groups. Thus, the experience of migration, while transforming spatialities, is closely associated with cultural exchanges, with their gains and losses, creations and recreations, in which traditional meanings permeate new forms, just as traditional forms are reconfigured with new meanings, expanding, if not displacing, the notion of borders.
Migrants carry with them traditions, ways of perceiving power, people, nature, and the cosmos, experiences of struggle, symbols, images, religious practices, and, ultimately, a history that goes beyond formal, institutional, or political-administrative boundaries. This approach opens new perspectives for investigation, as we understand that these migratory processes constitute social experiences that permeate society on multiple levels. By thinking about labor relations in this way, we are enabled to develop themes that problematize ways of life and forms of free and unfree labor (enslaved, analogous to slavery, compulsory, forced, and degrading) in both urban and rural contexts, as well as the varied forms of displacement and mobility that constitute historically marked migratory movements in social experiences. Studying the worlds of work from these perspectives means opening a broad range of interpretative possibilities around experiences shaped during periods of drought (or floods), epidemics, diseases and ways of treating them, power structures linked to land ownership, relationships with the environment, and the multiple dimensions of urban growth, such as the formation of the working class and the diverse survival strategies of men and women from subordinated social strata.
