SCIENTIFIC COORDINATION

António Sousa Ribeiro

 
EXECUTIVE COORDINATION

Graça Capinha

 
PRESENTATION

This programme aims at promoting research, critical thinking and teaching within the fields of Anglo-American Studies and Contemporary History in order exercise an active and informed citizenship. This course belongs to the scope of knowledge related to the human being, in time and space, knowledge related to memory, languages, its social use and political dimension. By also including a permanent reflection about the status, possibilities and limits of those sets of knowledge, in order to test their epistemological and institutional relations, the course could not leave out the dialogue between cultures and the internationalization of research.

The analysis will be applied to the observation and reflection on the problematic of languages and heterodoxies in their relationship with contemporary cultural and/or social practices. In the interaction between language and silence, both poetically (poiein in the sense of 'to do') and socially, we build what we call “real”: history, literature, identities, all social practices which we face in a globalized world.

The program contents of each curricular units aim at a critical thinking and work about language and its social construction of what is “real”. In this sense, the curricular units offered by Anglo-American Studies, those offered by History and those offered by Sociology aim at observing and reflecting on different experiences, respectively, in the areas of literary production (understanding how social and political intervention occurs always in/with words: like poetic avant-garde, exile, emigration, women's voices played in emancipatory practices) and other cultural practices, always historically and socially contextualized (observing the mass culture or militancy in new social movements, always permeated and conveyed in and through language, both as practices of regulation and as practices of resistance and heterodoxy). From the materiality of word, the programme offers the observation of diverse linguistic objects (from the literary text to the historical document; from the memory in autobiography, oral history and interview to the narratives of the media or governance and political resistance) in order to produce a reflection on language and power, whether in synchronic or diachronic terms.

The Programme “Languages and Heterodoxies: History, Poetics and Social Practices” will benefit from the experience achieved from the Doctoral Programme “Languages, Identities and Globalisation”, initiated in the 2nd semester of the 2004-05 school year, doctoral projects of which, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, are expected to end in 2011.