In the last decade Portugal had three governments with very different political orientations and proposals for the legislative organization of society, each one claiming to initiate a process of transformative politics that would have a positive impact upon Portuguese society. Social policies, legislation on labor, health, education, housing and security have been profoundly altered with each legislative change, impacting in different ways upon the institutions concerned and upon people’s lives. Furthermore, the economic crisis has engendered a crisis in the European model, which are inter-related and reveal a breakdown of social reproduction which puts into question redistribution models both at the macro (market, State), meso (mediating institutions and actors) and micro-scales of social interaction (families, social networks). LIVEPOLITICS focus on the different ways citizens experience the policies which govern their lives in a daily basis, how they implement them and what kind of negotiations can take place in the framework of moral economies. Through a detailed examination of the ways by which specific actors in diverse sectors of society experience legislation and policy orientations through a range of institutions, this project focuses on how perceptions of the legitimacy of policies emerge through policy implementation and negotiation within a wider analytical context of the workings moral economies. The project will focus on: 1) Livelihoods, policies, everyday life strategies; 2) Grassroots economics – definition, value and care regimes, interpretation and ways out of crisis; 3) Public policies, from conception, implementation and impact upon institutions and citizens. The project aims at reflecting on how different sectors of the Portuguese society experience their livelihoods through a permanent relation with state institutions throughout a decade of profound sociopolitical transformations. The strategies to overcome difficulties of provision under an au...

Work in contemporary societies has come to suffer several processes of change that in the context of the current economic and employment crisis (Veloso and Oliveira 2010), demands equating the structuring of identities that is built, destroyed and modified around work. Work continues to play an essential role both in the stability and in the appropriation of meaning in individual and social group trajectories (Veloso 2009) and in the social recognition mechanisms (Honneth 2005). Consequently, an examination of representations of work is a theme of great scientific and social importance. This research project seeks to analyse the social processes in the formation of work identities in Portugal and to recreate the resulting narratives that shape it. The project takes social representation as its theoretical-methodological basis (Moscovici 2000). Based on an analysis of a body of industrial films, which will allow us to highlight the main continuities and discontinuities of these narratives between the end of the 1920s and the 1980s, the project will follow a theoretically and methodologically innovative path. Taking work as its central focus, it will review the research already carried on social identities, work memories and identities and the relationship between technique and work(Veloso 2009; Marques 2011; Vidal 2006), to highlight the role of social memory in the construction of identities. The collective/social memory (Halbwachs 1994) is the central axis of the project, since it is this that will allow us to demonstrate, at both the individual and collective level, the social processes in the construction of work representation. While previous research has favoured the ethnographic method (Marques 2011), the intensive observation of work contexts (Veloso 2009) or archival analysis (Vidal 2006), this project proposes taking cinema as its starting point - and more particularly, industrial documentaries that were made in Portugal for both private and public bodies. ...