The programme focuses on the colonial heritage and the challenges of the post-colonial present, with special attention to the study of relations generated by the colonial encounter in the Portuguese-speaking space. Based on the postcolonial critique, it aims to develop advanced studies focusing on critical issues for the analysis of the complexity of the structure of political, social and cultural relationships in the contemporary world. Its epistemological horizon is fuelled by a discussion on the possibility of forms of knowledge sufficiently large to include the hybrid diversity and plurality of different modes of being in the world. Its starting hypothesis is that the narrative of modernity does not exhaust the complexity and heterogeneity of the world and the ways of knowing the world, that before repressed and silenced other competing narratives, sending them to a subordinate position within unequal and often violent power relations. The task at hand is therefore the production of a contextual and positional knowledge able to formulate alternative possibilities that can underpin the emergence of a truly global citizenship based on overcoming cognitive injustice.

The modern world has been significantly configured by the colonial expansion. Moreover, the end of colonial empires did not put an end to colonialism, that is, to the persistence of power relations and perceptions of difference that remain decisively dominated by colonial model, as shown, for example, by the current structures of hegemonic globalization. The critique of Eurocentrism provided by the post-colonial thinking provides a solid basis to explore new conditions for the articulation of alternative epistemologies and to question the dominant narratives that have shaped our understanding of the world, thus opening up the possibility of promoting egalitarian cooperation between researchers of the "North" and "South" of the world-system.

The post-colonial thinking is, by definition, transdisciplinary It is understood as a borderline thinking capable of transgressing disciplinary boundaries and destabilize established dichotomies. Accordingly, the doctoral programme, firmly situated at the interface between the social sciences and the humanities, is structured in order to run through a broad spectrum of knowledge areas, from literary and cultural studies to sociology, history, anthropology and political science. This pluralistic approach is reflected in how productively the programme sees the postcolonial paradigm. In fact, the plural form of "postcolonialisms" aims to draw attention to the fact, often overlooked, that the first modernity, the Iberian modernity, and the empires historically developed have led in directions that, in many ways, are not covered by dominant postcolonial theories of Anglo-Saxon origin. The invisibility effect thus generated redounds in a vast "waste of experience" (Boaventura de Sousa Santos), in the sense that the specificities of these contexts, explicitly or implicitly classified as subordinates, are not taken into account or tend to be assimilated by the standard narrative , resulting in a greatly problematic reduction of complexity.

By emphasizing a broad set of issues made invisible by hegemonic paradigms, the programme is considered as a reflective and self-reflective space of training for complexity. The metaphor of translation aptly describes the objective pursued by the programme of confronting the diversity of experience and the different approaches to knowledge in a manner likely to provide conditions of articulation and mutual intelligibility without sacrificing difference in the name of blind assimilation. At the same time, by focusing on the contemporary and giving attention to issues related to the state, society and culture in the modern world-system, the programme sees the notion of contemporary as the constellation of a dense semantics of historical time and, thus, continuously uses the historical context.