CECC - Documentos de Conferências / Conference Objects
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- O refugiado climático - uma nova categoria político-jurídicaPublication . Pereira, AlexandraClimate change has given rise to increasing phenomena involving the displacement of affected people or groups across different regions or countries around the world. Climate displacement accompanies global inequalities. However, the concept of climate refugees corresponds to a status of legal-political protection that has not been internationally recognized yet. Based on a systematic literature review comparing definitions of the category of “climate refugees” proposed by different authors, as well as based on online media data, I propose a broader and more humanistic definition for the concept of “climate refugees”. Desirably, contributing to the societal debate on the harmonized international legal framework required for the recognition of such legal protection status and juridical-political category. Thus, I open the way to a definition of “climate refugees” within the framework of integral human development and its correlative concept of integral ecology.
- Fake news e polarização política no Brasil: o antibolsonarismo no twitter desde a pandemia Covid-19 até às eleições presidenciais de 2022Publication . Pereira, Alexandra“Fake news” include a diverse mesh of false information, defamation and slander – disseminated in an organized and strategic way, or through organic networks (Zhuravskaya et al, 2020). This is a qualitative investigation, combining participant observation with data collected through a prolonged online ethnography, carried out between the Spring of 2020 (beginning of the pandemic crisis), through the CPI of Covid in the Brazilian Senate (April-October 2021), and until to Autumn of 2022 (Brazilian presidential elections). It was carried out through the social network Twitter, and data were analyzed by using NVivo 11. The results allow the analysis of the typical modus operandi of both Bolsonarism and anti-Bolsonarism, including the graphs shared by data analysts (Barciela and Malini, 2020-2022). They will be particularly relevant to European sociologists who are interested in the American influence on Brazilian politics and on the ways how new media influence and interact with political events.
- A typology of content creatorsPublication . Roberts, Jessica; Steiner, Linda
- Decoding silence in thematic analysis: cancel culture, narrative control, and image rehabilitationPublication . Müller, Naíde; Tavares, Patrícia; Simão, JoãoIntroduction: This study examines the innovative concept of decoding silence through thematic analysis, focusing on Taylor Swift’s Reputation album. After a period of silence following a public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2016, Swift reemerged with Reputation, providing a context for exploring the role of strategic silence as a communicative tool in the context of cancel culture. This research is significant as it addresses the underexplored role of silence in narrative control and image rehabilitation, particularly in the realm of celebrity culture. Goals and Methods: The primary aim is to investigate how Swift utilizes thematic elements in her lyrics, visuals, and music videos to reshape the public narrative post-silence. Employing thematic categorical content analysis, the study will analyze all 15 songs from the Reputation album. This methodology allows for the identification of recurring themes related to silence, power dynamics, identity, and resilience. Additionally, the analysis will incorporate selected media articles and fan reactions to enrich understanding of Swift’s narrative strategies. Results: Expected findings suggest that Reputation serves as a platform for Swift’s narrative rehabilitation and reflects a strategic use of silence as resistance. The thematic analysis is anticipated to reveal the complex interplay between silence and voice, highlighting her reestablished agency in the public eye. Conclusions: This study emphasizes the importance of decoding silence in thematic analysis, positioning it as a crucial element in understanding celebrity narrative management. By showcasing how silence can be a strategic tool, the research contributes to discussions of cancel culture and image rehabilitation in the music industry, illustrating how artists, particularly women, reclaim their narratives through nuanced storytelling.
- Failed hostesses, precarious guests, and familiar parasites: sites of (in)hospitality in dulce Maria Cardoso’s ElietePublication . Lino, Verena LindemannThe traditional locus of hospitality is the welcome of an unknown, foreign guest. As Derrida (1999) famously argues, usually this sort of welcome does not only go along with a set of (violent) conditions, but also involves the appropriation of a space as one’s own. By saying welcome, the host asserts himself as the master and owner of a house or land over which he holds the right to decide who is admitted and who is not. But what happens to hospitality when we leave this locus? When we do not look at master and stranger, but instead on other members of the household that do inhabit but not own the house? Or guests that are well-known? And what about a home whose master seems to be absent? In the present paper I propose to explore these and similar questions in the context of Dulce Maria Cardoso’s novel Eliete: a vida normal (2018) [Eliete: A Normal Life, 2024]. Focusing on three specific sites of (in)hospitality, I argue that Cardoso’s text uses situations of welcome/intrusion to problematize processes of subjectification and social stratification in contemporary Portuguese society. Placing emphasis on ambiguous constellations in which a host-guest dichotomy is unsettled, I analyse how the novel articulates the complexity of the self-other relationship, accentuating not only precarious attempts of (female) identity formation, but also how the private, normal life of the protagonist is haunted by the memory of fascism/authoritarianism and empire.
- Haunted ties: queering the memory of violence in Yara Nakahanda Monteiro’s Essa Dama Bate BuéPublication . Lino, Verena LindemannPublished in 2018, Yara Nakahanda Monteiro’s first novel Essa Dama Bate Bué (translated into English as Loose Ties in 2021) explores the complex ongoing effects of Portuguese colonialism and succeeding wars (first of liberation and then civil) in Angola. In this paper I explore how socio-political and historical dimensions of the memory of colonial violence and armed conflicts moves between the collective and personal and is mapped on the life of the female protagonist of Monteiro’s novel, Vitória Queiroz da Fonseca. Essa Dama Bate Bué follows Vitória from Portugal to Angola on her quest to find her mother, who left her as a baby to be raised by her grandparents. Having no own memory of her, Vitória only knows that her mother abandoned her family and joined the armed fight for independence before she was born. While her mother stayed in Angola, Vitória was brought to Portugal with her grandparents, to be raised in a village within a traditional catholic setting. A few days before she is supposed to get married to the brother of her secret female lover, Vitória runs away to Angola to find her mother. The search leads her not from Portugal to Angola and from Luanda to Huambo, without finding what she had hoped for. In this paper I propose use ‘queerness as a conceptual — ontological and epistemic — tool of analysis‘ (Phiri 2022, 5) for the articulation of trauma and the mode of working through violent histories in Monteiro’s novel. I argue that in Essa Dama Bate Bué ‘queerness’ functions as a way to address the complex entanglements between private and public memories and histories in view of various layers of traumatic gendered and racialized violence. By focusing on female charterers and the figure of the mother, Monteiro articulates not only complex modes of implication (Rothberg 2019) that trouble any clear definition of innocence and guilt, but also emphasizes how the gendered, heteronormative ‘colonial project’ continues to reverberate in the present. Through the traumatic history of the mother daughter relation, Monteiro seeks to write beyond masculinist narratives that circumscribe women to “mothers and mates needed to create male heirs” (Wright 2004, 138). Foregrounding instead female agency and violence, Monteiro does not only work through the echoes of Portuguese imperial propaganda and the marginalized memory of women during the Angolan process of independence and following civil wars, but also through the ‘gendered hierarchies and asymmetries that pervade blackness and black diaspora studies’ (Phiri 2022, 4). While the traumatic (gendered and racialized) violence continues to haunt the protagonist, I argue that in Monteiro’s novel, losing all the ties of memory may also enable the protagonist not to redeem the past but to begin anew despite all.
- Convivial society, the (im)possible future? The gifted and the question of being (non-)humanPublication . Gonçalves, DianaThe beginning of the 21st century has been characterized by a growing uneasiness regarding humans and their role as the only species with enough power to both transform life on the planet and endanger it to the point of extinction. Departing from these concerns about the environment, this paper wishes to look at the human ecosystem and try to evaluate the possibility of the creation of an ecologically literate society that promotes conviviality and a sustainable and interconnected existence.For this purpose, I intend to analyse the science fiction TV series The Gifted (2017) as a challenge to the anthropocentric discourse that focuses on man’s distinguished and dominating condition. Based on Marvel Comics’ X-Men series, this show introduces a society in ebullition, with humans and mutants in opposing ideological poles and in the midst of a fight for civil rights and social justice. The society portrayed in The Gifted is deeply marked by a wide range of conflicts and tensions, many of them derived from the inability to accept and integrate difference, especially when one feels threatened by an Other who may constitute the next step in the evolution of species.By means of an ecocritical reading of the show and the issues it raises (evolution/regression, humanity/animality, homogeneity/diversity, cooperation/segregation, among others), this paper investigates the (im)possibility of creating a convivial society where fear and anxiety are replaced by constant acts of negotiation that allow for a more inclusive culture and pacific coexistence.
- The impact of social media on women's paths to cosmetic enhancementPublication . Santos, Susana; Chagas, Bernardo; Tavares, PatríciaThis study examines the role of social media and social media influencers in shaping self-perceptions and decisions related to cosmetic procedures. It aims to clarify how social media influences the customer’s path towards cosmetic enhancements. Interviews with women who had procedures reveal that comparisons to online images negatively affect self-image. Influencers notably affect non-invasive procedure decisions, while invasive ones are influenced by lasting dissatisfaction and familial opinions. However, low self-esteem and comparison with self-edited images play significant roles. Findings contribute to academia, practitioners, and policymakers,shedding light on the multifaceted influences on cosmetic procedure choices.
- An encounter by another name: O último dia de leão as a ‘beyond’ and ‘before’ experiencePublication . Iyer, AishwaryaThe experience of an encounter populates Tim Ingold’s 2011 book Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. Although Ingold decisively critiques premediated colonial encounters of the human mind and proposes a grounded approach for postcolonial encounters, his insights fall short of addressing the experience within the technological condition. Through a posthuman critique, the articulation of the experience from being purely in the physiologically here and now has seen a marked shift towards the transversal capacity of it trespassing linear temporal-spaces but also political, ecological, and social intersections (Ingold 2011; Haraway 2016; Braidotti 2018). However, while work in the field of postcolonial and posthuman studies has aimed to highlight the very aggression that has manifested in the mechanisms of the Modernity/ Coloniality project – delineating the encounter as a strategy primarily as acts of violence, a theoretical transgression through Sara Ahmed allows me to elaborate the experience as mediations that demonstrate the partial perception of encounters. With a reading of O Último Dia de Leão (Leo’s Last Day), a performance by Nany Dayanne, set within the condition of linguistic incommunicability, I present the mediated gesture of the experience, one aided with Ahmed’s understanding of it as an ethical ‘before’ and ‘beyond’, and present a proposition for an encounter by another name.
- Space narratives, geographical imaginaries and destination cosmologies: from 17th century Portuguese Jesuits in Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet to 21st century Nepali migrants in EuropePublication . Pereira, AlexandraTo adress space as a narrative process (Lotman, 2005), we need to inquire on the multiple ways how the meaning of spaces evolves through time, experience and across cultures. What cognitive structures, references and memories shape our construction of meaning about places? In this study, I depart from a description of Iberian colonial legacies and 17th century european spatial narratives regarding Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet and India (Gettelman, 1982), to compare them with postcolonial spatial narratives by 21st century Nepali migrants in Europe (Samaddar, 2020; Neubauer, 2023). I articulate these recent migratory flows with postcolonial heritages and the “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) in our modern, capitalist world-system, to examine the particular space representations of european destination countries by the migrants themselves. This is a qualitative and interpretative research, combining data from 30 semi-structured interviews with Nepali female migrants in Portugal and 30 other semi-structured interviews with Nepali male and female migrants in Spain and Portugal – together with participant observation, the field diary and the ethnographic method. In order to compare and draw parallelisms between different spacial narratives through time, space and across cultures and religions, I will analyze and give examples of the concepts of “geographical imaginaries” (Driver, 2014; Thompson, 2017; Zanker and Hennessey, 2021), “destination cosmologies” (Belloni, 2020), and “spatial imaginary spillover” (Neubauer, 2023). I will conclude with the implications of such findings and questions about the spatial narratives that we want for the future.