Postgraduate Program in History

Language and Identification

The Human Sciences have, over the last decades, given significant relevance to the symbolic contents, allegories, social imagery, alterity exercises, reinterpretations, and debates on themes such as the production of speeches in the clef of varied languages ​​and multiple representations that, little by little, are consolidated in the current historiography. History, by adopting a plurality of meanings, presents itself with more freedom of interpretation and conceptual flexibility, contributing to a certain continuum between the period in which studying takes place and the time of its writing.

Among the various possibilities for research and reflection associated with the History of the Present Time – which is built as a knowledge of/in frontiers – is the problem of understanding languages ​​as a means of expressing discourses that build and give meaning to the world (Chartier). They mark places, institute subjects, create fields of knowledge, mark dialogues, but they also induce the thinking about crossings, intersections, interactions, transit, permeabilities. In this respect, languages ​​propose and articulate themselves to identifications, along with a wide variety of symbolic resources derived from tradition and experience, giving rise to sensitivities and recognitions of singular characteristics that are shared and inserted, equally, in plots, transitions, compositions, or mixing of races and hybridisms (Gruzinski).

This Line intends to point to the production of meanings regarding contemporary socio-cultural phenomena, making use of theoretical and conceptual elements that allow it to translate the images and processes unveiled in the Present Time. This not only allows but also requires the interaction and dialogue with other disciplinary fields (such as Anthropology, Semiotics, Literary Theory) without establishing value hierarchies among the fields of knowledge but basing it on historical approaches and perspectives. This perspective establishes an axis of apparently diverse themes such as the studies on songs, the narratives about the migratory experiences, the displacement of identities and the mediations and tensions that they entail, the reading and writing practices, the studies on appearance, the analyses regarding the cities and urban living, the processes of investing heritage status, the relations with the media, among other phenomena considered from different educational standpoints, but which converge to the interactions between languages ​​and identifications as historical constructions.

Due to that, the researchers gathered here articulate their themes around works that challenge them to expand their spaces of action through formalizations that are, above all, in the symbolic field and, thus, seek to contribute to an understanding of the intricate historical events that happened over the past century or unfolded at the beginning of this new century. Anchored in a diversity of languages ​(textual, imagery, sound) and integrated with the perception that these create and involve identifications and sensitivities, they understand that their studies express representations of the world, seek to assimilate their diversity, and diffuse different problematizations regarding the ways of life and of being of men and women in their displaced experience.