Postgraduate Program in History

Political Cultures and Sociabilities

The formation of this line of research is supported by approaches on the History of the Present Time that signal the return of the political (Rémond) as an inflection of the historical analysis focused on contemporary social processes, demanding a more consistent field of investigation. The transformations and events that marked the 20th century or the beginning of the 21st century, such as the diffusion of Nazi-fascism, the end of the Cold War, the American hegemony, and the new patterns of behavior, made it necessary to replace, on other bases, the issue of power and public life.

The researches gathered on this line are situated in the tension created by the emergence of sociabilities that awaken new meanings for the political field. Recent studies, within the scope of Social Sciences, point to the triggering of flexible and disengaged social relations, associated with processes of productive restructuring. Such a configuration would result in a depoliticized and intimate withdrawal (Sennett) of individuals and groups in search of security, avoiding civic spaces, conflicts, and heterogeneities. However, it must be considered that the term "political" has undergone displacements originating, mainly, of a change in perspective no longer centered on the State and its mechanisms of domination and legitimation. As a result, there is a broadening of the scope of the political, involving speeches, representations, and experiences elaborated in the networks of sociabilities, highlighting the problematic articulation between culture and politics, manifested in ethnic, generational, and gender issues, and in those related to the scope of family, urban cultures, public policies, schooling, and social movements.

The use of the idea of political culture constitutes an effort of the researchers in this line of research to attribute meanings to the dispersed sociabilities and the horizons of expectations of diverse social groups. It is understood, then, that there is a composite of political cultures involving the fabric of social relations, from which the emphasis on the political dimension and the historical implications of contemporary social phenomena, such as the so-called globalization, the disembodied work, the deterritorialization of power, the reduction of democracy to the electoral dispute, and the affirmation of other practices of control, surveillance and social hierarchy, results.

The intention of historically associating political cultures and sociabilities presupposes, in theoretical and methodological terms, that the political field can't be reduced to a delimited instance or a superstructure. It is understood as a space of articulation between the social and its representations (Rosanvallon), in a given historicity, in order to capture the complexity of the Present Time. This means that relations of unequal forces refer both to forms of submission and legitimization of the instituted systems, as well as to social practices that suggest games of simulations and reciprocities, or to daily maneuvers and cunning in search of survival and autonomy (Certeau).

This interface with the sociabilities, understood as networks of interactions between individuals and social groups under certain historical conditions, defines the specificity of this line, bearing in mind the understanding of a Present Time saturated with differences. This results in the convergence of themes and studies on popular groups, people of African descent, elites, among others, including men and women who live in cities and countryside, who work and share experiences, memories, and social arrangements.