Politics, Social Movements, and Memory
Political history gained new momentum with the reassessment of classical concepts and political practices, and with the recognition that the political does not constitute a separate sector, but is intertwined with all other aspects of collective life. These studies contributed to expanding the conception of politics beyond the institutional/administrative sphere and began shedding light on the multiple micropowers operating within society and the role of different collective actors.
The political, therefore, takes the place of the articulation of the social and its representation, being equally the symbolic matrix in which the collective experience is rooted and reflected. Thus, politics is seen not as an epiphenomenon, but as an explanatory element of the entire social structure.
Political agents par excellence – and for this reason, the traditional object of historiographical reflection – social movements encompass all collective interventions aimed at transforming the conditions of existence of their actors, exercising their citizenship, contesting hierarchies or social relations, generating collective identities and feelings of belonging based on shared values.
Based on these definitions, the line will analyze social movements in an expanded way, emphasizing both those that are more structured, such as labor, student, and peasant movements, as well as organizations with more diffuse origins, linked to religious, immigration, and military movements, among others. All these movements encompass political, economic, social, and mentalities-related situations.
As for memory, we begin with the initial proposition of the famous text: "The concept of memory is crucial." (LE GOFF, 1990: 423). Crucial for its importance and also for its crossing character: it intersects, for example, temporalities, generations, institutions, and various social agents. It also crosses recording and invention, real and imaginary, ordinary and extraordinary, symbolic and concrete. These conjunctions, in a complex and tense dynamic, weave certain representations of the past – distant or recent – forging new narratives and meanings. A texture that is always in continuous construction, producing its opposite, forgetting, through the thread of memory. In this context, the importance of oral history stands out, especially for historians working with the present time.
As mentioned above, these processes of constructing the past to be remembered – and also the silence to which parts of past times are relegated – are of special interest to the political realm, taken here in its broadest sense, as the place of articulation of society and its representation. After all, it is in the world of experience that memory grows from history. And where the latter nourishes memory.
Therefore, the work in this line aims to focus on the processes of collective mobilization, both in democratic times and under authoritarian regimes, analyzing their roles in interaction with other movements, processes, and the State. It will examine the objectives, political culture, the trajectories that led to uprising, and its consequences, in a dialectical relationship between history and memory.
In terms of spatio-temporal markers, it is important to note that our studies and research will cover modern and contemporary times chronologically, while spatially, we will consider the American, European, and African worlds.