Society, Population Movements, and Cultures
The research line examines society and the relationships between various peoples and cultures that, from the modern and contemporary eras, produced continuous exchanges between each other. From the spatial perspective, it focuses on the regions affected by the colonizing processes of the Iberian world, whose experience expanded the known boundaries of the time, promoting "a global exchange system" integrating various continents from the 16th century to the present day. The central axis of this line is the relationship between society and its movements, with a focus on the concepts of culture, territory, and population.
The understanding of society encompasses its general aspects in the social relations between groups, as well as its specific characteristics, which attend to the peculiarities of different regions, spaces, and symbolic and physical territories.
The idea of movement, as it is inclusive and crosses multiple issues, allows for thinking about broad forms of mobility—of people and cultures across various territories. Hence, there is a need to analyze population movements, considered from two main possibilities. The first would be a strand in close dialogue with historical demography and the use of quantitative and qualitative methods, in order to recognize collective phenomena and behavioral patterns related to origins and the social mechanisms that sustain them.
A second approach would be to understand population movements from a series of phenomena produced by the movement of people across different territories, that is, collectives or individuals who travel between various regions and cultures. This phenomenon marks peoples, from their origins to present-day refugees, who carry with them more than just what is in their luggage. Their memories, social practices, religious convictions, and cultural expressions accompany their displacement, generating new social organizations.
Cultural movements are considered spaces of conflict and exchange, involving aspects related to the written and oral spheres; power relations between the dominated and the dominant; rural and urban worlds, and other possible dichotomies involving a complex range of issues. Thus, in examining various cultural practices, we start from the perspective of cultural circularity and the idea that the analyses must be placed within their historicity and investigated from points of tension, interaction, and negotiation.