Research Projects

The project aims to investigate the narratives and memories of victims and relatives of victims of violence perpetrated by the Brazilian state, with a specific focus on police violence. The study addresses the issue of memory and trauma, highlighting the importance of the process of remembering as a fundamental means for victims and their families to interpret, verbalize, and validate their traumatic experiences, constructing their own understandings of the violent events they have experienced, in contrast to the narratives imposed by the hegemonic media or the state. The act of remembering is not only an attempt to reconstruct the past, but also a form of resistance and struggle against the forgetting and invisibilization of the violence committed by the state.

Currently, it is necessary to reflect on and investigate the role of digital social media in the formation and dissemination of these dynamics and as tools that enable connectivity between individuals with similar experiences, promoting the collectivization of memory and mourning, as well as facilitating organization and mobilization. The methodology combines biographical narrative interviews with victims and relatives of victims and analysis of statements and dynamics of interaction on digital social media in order to deepen understanding of how the memories of these violences are constructed, shared, and contested, exploring both the subjective and emotional aspects as well as the political and social dynamics involved.

Lectures and round tables related to this project:

São Paulo Foundation and National Council for Technological and Scientific Development fully funded this research (2016-2020). It was undertaken both at the University of São Paulo (under Professor Marcos Cesar Alvarez’s supervision) and at the University of Chicago (under Professor Andreas Glaeser’s supervision).

The research falls into the scope of Sociology of Memory (more broadly Sociology of Mind and Sociology of Knowledge). From this field, we assume a relational, procedural, and interpretative approach for analyzing remembering and identity formation processes among former inmates of an institution for abandoned minors. Memory and identity are nested phenomena with biopsychosocial dimensions, which have been studied in many areas. Thus, we also considered arguments from the Cognitive Sciences and Philosophy of Mind. 

The research faced three challenges: a.) socio-historical research on early institutionalization’s Brazilian legal and institutional aspects. We researched newspapers and public documents about the matter back to the 19th Century; b.) theoretical research on the ontological and epistemological aspects of remembering and identity. We draw a theoretical debate over sociological, psychoanalytical, and philosophical writings. This debate also embraced the contemporary conditions regarding the impact and role of social technologies on sociability and knowledge production. The “Sociology of Understanding approached the micropolitical dimension of the mnemonic-identity processes of knowledge formation”; finally, The third part of this work analyzes narratives on the institutional past of the former inmates who attended a governmental institution in the Brazilian countryside between the 1940s and 1990s. We carried out a procedural analysis, multi-data, and multi-methods (ethnography, netnography, in-depth interview, extraction of textual data on social networks) to understand how collaborative mnemonic-identity processes play out over time by emphasizing how some versions of the past are validated at the expense of others. We observed that the mutual adjustments in understanding past experiences are pushed to a coherent biographical narrative that attends to specific emotional regimes. Consequently, contradictory narratives to the ones validated by the network of former inmates are marginalized and silenced.

This study developed a systematic and theoretical reconstruction of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, the constitutent parts of which are presented informally across three separate works: Les Cadres de la Mémoire Sociaux (1925), La Topographie des Léngendaire Evangiles en Terre Sainte (1941) and La Mémoire Collective (1950). The research dove into Halbwachs’ writings and reconstructed the intellectual context that was concerned with “memory” within Humanities, Psychology, and Philosophy. We analyzed Halbwachs’ main intellectual influences (Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson) to understand the problems he sought to answer. After an initial mapping, we were able to [reconstruct] his theory of collective memory by focusing on the main concepts: “collective memory,” “individual memory,” and “group.” We demonstrated the articulation of these concepts in a historical case: the formation of the Christian collective memory (which is also examined by Halbwachs in his writings). Once Halbwachs’ theory was rebuilt and demonstrated, we redefined the concept of “collective memory” by opposing it to other terms such as “social memory,” “cultural memory,” “tradition,” “myth,” “history,” and “knowledge.” Lastly, we tried to match this Halbwachsian conception of memory to contemporary theories of mind

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The research was developed at the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) / IBM- FAPESP, under the supervision of Professor Fabio Cozman. The project collected data on institutions that develop “baseline research” within Artificial Intelligence.

Japan Foundation fully funded this research (2021-2022) at the Yokohama City University. The research investigates the intercultural exchange among Nikkei people, especially Nippo-Brazilian families who live between Brazil and Japan. Two hundred fifty thousand native Japanese people have migrated to Brazil from 1908 to the 1970s. From the 1980s and on, part of these descendants has returned to Japan in a movement known as dekassegui immigration. In what follows, a crossed immigration flow has established between Brazil and Japan, and many Nippo-Brazilian families are cut across by these transnational movements that impact their stories, memories, and identities. Assuming the idea of identity as temporal self and acknowledging the importance of memory to support and build it, we intend to investigate the identity and memory formation among Nippo-Brazilians’ families from the women’s standpoint.
From interviews and documents, we interpreted and retraced how life stories of issei and nisei women, who had migrated to Brazil, interplay with their granddaughters and great-granddaughters who have returned to Japan. We transnationally crossed the narratives of the first or second generation of nikkei women that still live in Brazil with the third or fourth generations of nikkei women that moved to Japan. This way, the researchers analyzed how Nippo-Brazilian families make sense of their past and identity, considering transgenerational and transcultural narratives.
There is a gender-biased topography of collective memory in the cities (esp. the huge Japanese neighborhood in São Paulo city) and in institutional records, in which women’s roles are opaque against the background of the immigration’s macro narrative. However, the presence of Japanese migrant women is strong in non-published romances, haikai, biographies, and families’ memories in which they were the cornerstone. Some themes pervade all the narratives, such as the hardship of being a stranger where one lives, the hardship of being a woman with multiple responsibilities, the oppressive culture of men’s valorization, among others. The trajectories of sansei and yonsei dekassegui, who migrated to Japan years later, are distinctive from their mothers’ and grandmother’s trajectories in Brazil. These young women had a protagonist role in the migratory process. Once married, these women brought their Brazilian husbands (who also receive the visa) with them. They decide to move to chase a better economic horizon for their families in Brazil. In Japan, many of them became entrepreneurs to overcome wage inequality compared to men in factories. However, the dekassegui women still share many of the same challenges faced by their ancestors, such as the feeling of being a foreigner, the prejudice, the oppressive culture of men’s valorization, the burden of being a mother, a spouse, and a worker. They also share the feeling of displacement, a fragmented identity between Brazil and Japan.

This research supported the writing of the book “Sociology on Brazil: a brief intellectual and institutional history” published by Palgrave McMillan. It went through the institutional and intellectual development of sociology in Brazil from the early 1900s to the present day; through military coups, dictatorships and democracies. It charts the profound impact of sociology on Brazilian public life and how, in turn, upheavals in the country’s history and its universities affected its scientific agenda. Also, it highlighted the extent of the discipline’s colonial inheritance, its early institutionalization in São Paulo, and its congruent rise and fall during repeated regime changes. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the research mapped the concentration of research interests, new developments, publications, and production centers in Brazilian sociology. It concludes with a reflection on the potential impact of the recent far-right turn in Brazilian politics on the discipline’s future. The main target of the research was to provide a synthetic and valuable country study to the history of sociology for academics interested in historiography, intellectual and Brazilian history.