ECOFEMINDI investigates the relations between women and nonhuman world, importance of traditional ecological knowledge that women possess in indigenous societies and how this knowledge affects the role of women, their status and prestige in the household and the society they live in. After decades of discussions about nature/culture dichotomy and the dominant role of humans on nature and other nonhuman persons, today ecofeminists agree that there is also a parellel between the domination of nature and exploitation of women. Meanwhile, in the middle of environmental conflicts, political ontology discuss the need for pluriverse as a possibility instead of dualism of human and animals in Western world, taking indigenous ideas about their geography that involves nonhumans and master spirits more seriously. Siberia and Amazon regions often host the base for theoretical discussions about animism and nonhuman persons in literature. However, the gender perspective of these ontologies is hardly mentioned and this caused the human-environment relations being described rarely through the lens of critical feminist anthropology. In order to answer the research questions, Ecofem.indi will use qualitative research methods of social anthropology in two indigenous communities in Amazons and Siberia with a participatory methodology to understand the relations between women and nonhuman world.

In the framework of the current global debates regarding climate change, sustainability and energetic transition, the shift from a carbon-based to a green energy industry seems inevitable. While calls and resolutions towards ending fossil fuels slowly and irregularly make their way into the global diplomacy (e.g., COP26), the shift towards the electrification and digitalization of industrial, communication and transport sectors is creating an increasing global dependency on the extraction and processing of new resources. This is the case, for instance, of lithium (often dubbed the ‘oil of the future’) and graphite, essential components for the manufacture of batteries for cell phones, computers and electric cars, for instance. At the same time, ‘clean technologies’ such as green hydrogen, liquefied natural gas or renewables are presented as safe paths towards decarbonization and reduction of GHGs However, the study of the social, political and environmental consequences of the transition is still incipient. Such transformations, while they are generally positive steps towards energy sustainability and climate change adaptation, are generating new industrial sites, new complex economic relations and political mobilizations with socio-environmental consequences that need to be charted and studied from a social scientific perspective. We are talking specifically about environmental impacts of the new energy industry, its material and infrastructural articulations, conflicts over land property and use, political (public-private) articulations, labor and commercial opportunities, etc. In this framework, a new, energy-related geography is unfolding, complexifying the traditional cartographies of power based on North-South, postcolonial distinctions. This illustrates the increasing political centrality of such industries, both in terms of transnational diplomacies – the role of Nord Stream pipelines in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict being a case in point – and of crea...

According to the last WESO report, there are over 1.4bn workers in vulnerable jobs worldwide, with numbers expected to rise in 2020 due to COVID-19. Several attempts have been made at both domestic and international levels to address these concerns. This includes efforts through the Sustainable Development Goals process, which includes a specific statistical indicator to measure informal  employment (8.3.1), the formulation of SDG8 (decent work) and SDG9 (sustainable industrialization). Across countries and world regions, the degree to which SDGs have been used to address youth issues and inform national policies varies significantly. Indeed, in spite of the fact that the great majority of states have formally committed to addressing the SDGs, including those related to insecure employment, there is little evidence to indicate that developing regions currently have the capacity to systematically study the problems if informal employment and vulnerability in ways that facilitate the development and implementation of concrete viable solutions. This is due, in our view, to two major challenges. First, although a number of approaches that have been used inside the EU, there has been little, if any, attempt to adapt the existing framework elsewhere. Second, no systematic review of anti-precariousness policy has been attempted beyond the EU region. LABOUR is a research and training programme designed to address the above-mentioned shortfalls of research and development approaches with particular attention to a region where this is particularly worrying concern. Informal employment in Asia is estimated to account for 68.2% of the active population. By gathering a team of 14 participants that includes academic and non-academic partners working on labour insecurity, we aim not only at producing specialists on the topic and on the region but also at proposing concrete mitigation measures that can be taken into account by decision-makers and development organisations.

Women’s presence in the film industry is quite low compared to men’s. Additionally, as a cultural sector, cinema suffers from a lack of plurality, both on gender and on geographical expression terms. By bringing together the organizers of similar festivals from 8 Mediterranean countries, the Olhares do Mediterraneo- Women’s Film Festival will  promote dialogue and create opportunities for collaboration and improvement.   The project will create a network of 8 well established women’s festivals from 8 Mediterranean countries whose common goal is to reduce gender and ethnic discrimination in the cinematographic industry while promoting intercultural dialogue.  

Abstract The development of the Anthropology of Emotions as an autonomous field of research in Brazil dates from the 1990s. Since then, this area has evolved greatly with activities carried out in meetings and congresses of scientific associations in Brazil, such as ABA and ANPOC, and abroad, such as the Congress of Anthropology of the Mercosul, the European Association of Social Anthropology, the Portuguese Anthropological Association and the Argentinian Anthropological Association. The topics studied range from the relations between emotions, the body and experiences of health/illness to the micropolitical work done by emotions in phenomena of the public sphere, such as violence, police work, social movements, and professional institutions and trajectories. The present proposal articulates researchers from two lines of investigation at PPCIS: "Culture, subjectivity and emotions” and “Intellectuals, education and politics”. This articulation involves combining, in some research proposals, the study of emotions with the analysis of intellectual trajectories. The main goal of this project is the creation of an Iberian-American network in the Anthropology of Emotions, by stimulating the dialogues among researchers in Brazil, Argentina, Portugal and Spain. This project will be developed through four articulated formats: a) the joint production of events, short courses and workshops as part of work missions; b) through coauthorship and co-editing of publications; c) the creation of a website to publicize events and publications; d) through comparative research projects. The research projects involved in this proposal study the possibilities and limits of treating emotions as objects of social science investigation in four major areas: a) emotions, intellectual trajectory and scientific fields; b) the body, health, emotion and gender; c) crisis, suffering and caring, d) policing, public safety and emotions.

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...

This project tackles the popular notions of social justice in the current context of crisis. This crisis, and its political management based on austerity policies, is triggering social unrest due to the transgression of moral principles and previous expectations, which forces individuals to state and re-ellaborate their notions of justice and injustice. We intend to embrace the analytical opportunity entailed by this process. The main goal of the project is to elucidate how, when and why the different dimensions of the notion of justice -distributive justice,recognition, and representation or political participation- operate. Without denying that such dimensions are often intertwined, it is our central hypothesis that, in a context of economic crisis, redistribution takes precedence over the rest. As a second goal, we intend to address the link between the sense of injustice and the delegitimation of the governance system. The  consequences of this delegitimation, understood as the social reactions to the crisis, will be investigated accordingly. And, as a third goal, we intend to shed light into the emergence of “moral communities”, that is to say, the invocation of socially enclosured moral bonds resulting from claims for the restitution of justice. The consequences of the emergence and transformation of such “moral communities” in terms of social inclusion and exclusion will also be addressed. Assuming that theoretical principles only appear under specific empirical conditions, the project will use a case study methodology in order to detect relevant regularities and variations within the specificity and diversity of the observed realities. As a result, our contribution to the progress of the theory on justice will consist on the verification and reformulation of the departing theoretical assumptions -on the social perceptions of (in)justice, on the social reactions in front of the delegitimation of governance, and on the formation of “moral communities”-, taking...

The BIP-ZIP program "Bairro Leitor" is promoted by the Lisbon Municipal Council which aims to requalify and boost Ajuda Parish Council focusing on Casalinho da Ajuda's neighborhood in partnership with several entities: the Ajuda Parish Council, the Association of Support and Psycho-Social Security and the Laredo Cultural Association. The goal is to make the neighborhood a place where one can live better due to its reader's calling, working along with the communities and optimizing existing and work-in-progress resources. In a transgenerational and non-formal education approach, subjects are chosen amongst younger residents because of their potential for community involvement and condition for a future sustainability. On the 50th anniversary of the neighborhood (2020), we hope that this changes will be evident and positive and the quarter's improvement will attain its sustainability.

In 2006 the second major wave in the number of mixed couples in Spain began. The same year we got our first I+D project, which was followed by two more. These three studies, covering a period of almost ten years (2006-2015), provide us with a comprehensive view of the fundamental characteristics of binational couples formed by a Spaniard and a foreign spouse. More specifically, characteristics concerning to the origins, constitution, motivations, expectations, gender relations and identity negotiations, since these are our research basic axes. This panoramic view is mostly based on the nearly 150 in-depth interviews and more than 190 informants involved. From these projects we have a static image, a snapshot of the issues raised in a time when most of these couples were recently established and were therefore in the initial phase of their relationship. Many of them had no children, divorce cases were rare, the foreign spouse was still in the process of acquiring citizenship, applying for the recognition of their university degree or looking for a first job. Most of these couples were just rehearsing their interaction formulas with their families of orientation, and some issues that eventually became capital were not even raised yet. In addition, in many of our interviews the effects of the economic crisis were not present or were not very noticeable. Effects that in some cases, as we have documented in our third project, have led to the emigration of some of the couples to the country of origin of the foreign spouse. The present project, supported by all the background accumulated over the past studies, intends to overcome the temporary limitation of the results, as well as to record the changes and continuities experienced by these couples since we last interviewed them. We are going to connect with the biographical trajectories of a sample selected from the large number of informants previously interviewed, using the methodology of longitudinal qualitative researc...

This project aims at discussing the way uncertainty as a consequence of the precarization of work conditions has become a constitutive element of livehoods, and acquiring multiple and constitutive meanings. This will be achieved by observing different contexts and actors regarding work, family and the social. The investigation will take place in a plurality of social contexts and in the following areas: (industrial, agricultural and services; young people and the elderly; emigrants and immigrants; urban and rural contexts). It will allow us to understand the multiplicity of elements which affect livelihoods, and the multiple layers that condition ones existence in the work market.  In Portugal the imposition of austerity regimes to tackle the sovereign debt crisis have generated an important crisis of social reproduction. Portugal is now facing an alarming rising of unemployment rates, shrinking family incomes, tax growth, increased cost of living, decrease of welfare benefits, policies of labour devaluation, growing job destruction; increased income inequality; rising levels of poverty; the increasing feelings of welfare dispossession and citizenship destitution and an overwhelming sensation of economic and social instability and uncertainty. Uncertainty is one of the most visible faces of the current social and economic crisis in Portugal. Efforts to combat the sovereign debt crisis have produced significant structural changes:profound destabilization of livelihoods, social protections, occupational identities and societal bonds.This project aims at understanding how the crisis has altered the perceptions of precarity and how new vocabularies and representations of the term emerge in different segments of Portuguese society.The spectre of unemployment indicates profound changes in the relationship between individuals, the society and the market. The increased flexibility of labor laws within a neoliberal economic paradigm associated with a logic of short-term prof...

The Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) is an interuniversity R&D unit founded in 2007. CRIA is a dynamic network based on four universities (NOVA FCSH, ISCTE-IUL, U. Coimbra and UMinho). This network’s functioning enables each institutional division to autonomously develop its own activities while they all share the fundamental resources necessary to the management, fundraising, research dissemination, teaching and knowledge transfer. It furthermore encourages the mobility of CRIA’s researchers between the centre’s different institutional grounds.

In Southern Europe promises of wellbeing and social mobility have become increasingly elusive since 2008. Economists and policy makers have provided analyses and advised on political action to end the economic crisis, but this has often resulted in greater precarity producing social protest as well as nationalistic and xenophobic reactions. Expert’s accounts are based on mainstream economic models designed to provide monetary stability and growth through enhanced competition in open markets. These models are ‘technical’ and top-down models that largely ignore political, social and cultural dynamics on the ground. Yet social agents are embedded in multiple regimes of value and institutional frames that guide their economic behavior.Four Southern European countries –Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain— have been strategically selected as research sites due to their relevance in the current European crisis. The project investigates grassroots economics by addressing the social, cultural and political environments in which common people make everyday economic decisions. Through an interdisciplinary approach that uses ethnographic fieldwork and comparative analysis, it highlights the interaction between individuals, households and institutions from a threefold perspective 1) as creating meanings in which the value(s) of action are assessed, 2) as defining the material and ideological conditions of possibility for designing projects, and 3) as providing resources and creating various distribution patterns. It explores the relationship between authoritative models of the economy and the real economic projects and practices of those whose main objective is the pursuit of livelihood.The comparison of grassroots economics with mainstream expert economics will support a theoretically ground-breaking explanatory framework that will shed light on ongoing problems of livelihood insecurity and policy design that are currently left unaddressed by economic policies.

Departing from the Portuguese context this project aims at understanding how other States mobilize cultural, social and economic resources in contexts of crisis and vulnerability. More than a mere acknowledgement of the State of the art on the public policies in each Country, we are finding that different generations response differently to the crises situations that they experience. The work will be organized through four tasks each different countries in order to understand and analyze how policies are designed in different generations and various scenarios, and how these same policies are experienced by the subject to which these same policies are aimed at: young street in Maputo; Youth, international migration and Social reproduction; Anthropology, public policy and Global governance; Care and Aging in the interstices of Welfare States.

The concept of Care is being used in Anthropology to address situations where deprivation and health problems are dealt with in ways that include, but are not limited to, state provision to citizens (Benda-Beckmann 1988). In the relational existence of daily life, people use care in a broad sense to describe the processes and the sentiments between people who take care of each other in various dimensions of social life and who are not necessarily in need. For the human being as a person, to be, means being with others; taking care and being taken care of, thus implying both a practical and emotional involvement. Care is a motivational disposition to enact moral ideologies of good and right. Thus, it is frequently through the metaphor of 'care' that people express their moral concerns and practices of an ideal existence in a world with deep inequalities and deprived people. Care also has a moral significance: based on concern and dedication it implies the acknowledgment of the other in relation to one's existence thus becoming a constitutive element of social bonding. Bearing this framework in mind, and focusing on the Portuguese example, the project offers an innovative approach which combines the significance of economic factors with an emphasis on phenomenology. How do people respond to crisis situations in order to create sustainable existence for themselves, their significant ones and the world they live in? How do caring practices express or create sentiments of shame, care, dependence, compassion, solidarity, morality, dignity and self-esteem? What are the criteria for choosing to reach out to others: nationality, peer group, kinship, or ideology? How do 'market' or 'material' economic interests intersect with other interests such as creating a sense of belonging, fulfilling a moral duty, taking a political stance, responding to a religious calling, making one's life more meaningful? Portugal is currently undergoing a major social and economic situation of 'cr...

Sustainability has become a master concept in economic policies in Europe and around the world. The objective of this project is to analyze the discourse and practices of sustainability that different social agents have developed in the last decade in order to assess the efficacy and coherence of the sustainability programme. Moreover, the project seeks to critically unpack the concept of “sustainability”, questioning its capacity as an analytical concept. We will approach sustainability from different angles: 1) as a concept that often holds contradictory or ambivalent meanings for different stakeholders, social groups and institutions, 2) as a practice that implements policies defined by their ‘sustainable’ aim in widely different and local contexts, and 3) as a framing argument that engages civil society actors in various ways in response to ongoing political economic transformations. The hypothesis we seek to explore is that there are substantial contradictions and ambivalences between different social actors’ understandings of, and practices toward, ‘sustainability’ (various policy makers, large firms, civil society groups and ordinary citizens). This in turn is a potential basis for conflict and becomes a real obstacle toward the aim of social and territorial cohesion and towards an integrated objective of economic, environmental and social reproduction. This comparative study based on ethnographic, documentary and secondary statistical material seeks to make a major theoretical contribution by transforming the concepts and hierarchies for thinking about economic and social sustainability, through the emphasis on individual, institutional and collective actors’ understandings of social justice.

In the last decades we have witnessed deep transformations in Portuguese society. Their pace and intensity in the various dimensions of national social life have diverse implications on different social groups, status groups, and gender categories, thus distinguishing practices and social values. Family has been a dimension where occurred the most significant changes in Portugal, particularly in the ways of perceiving conjugality, late age in marrying, decreasing number of children (with greater investment in their care and education) increasing number of divorces, and the establishment of new forms of organising the family (de facto unions – hetero and homosexual –, single parent, reconstructed households and adoption). However, changes in family relations are not restricted to these “new families” but also affect the ways in which relations within the so-called “traditional family structures” (nuclear heterosexual) are lived and perceived. \nSuch changes raise questions urging to be analysed: 1) present family practices in different formal organizations reveal the loss of importance of values associated with the traditional family (the affective and relational investment in familial relations– in the sharing of daily experiences and life planning – radically transforms the meaning of family, where interpersonal relations – and not consanguinity or alliance – become central elements to constitute relatedness); 2) cultural values and social representations associated with the traditional family model remain hegemonic in various domains of Portuguese social life (see the strong political opposition to proposals seeking to liberalise family law, abortion, and adoption).\nThis project aims to identify the values, meanings, and ways of living family relations in Portugal in order to reflect critically upon the presuppositions of normality of the nuclear heterosexual family in kinship studies. Research will be based on case studies, with long-term fieldwork among a signi...

Portugal has gone through several changes over the last few decades, with Portuguese society having become characterised by a complex "unfinished modernity". The family and school have been two of those fields under transformation, in which the past and the present come together to form new modalities. Based on those two realities, the aim of this study is to characterise and explain the construction of integration pathways into the labour market (formal and informal) within a universe of young people, boys and girls, from different ethnic and social backgrounds, students of the 3rd basic and secondary education levels. Using an approach that is mainly qualitative, based on case studies involving interviews with young people (students from public schools that are part of the "Observatório Permanente de Escolas ICS") and their respective families, the end product involves the elaboration of a typology of the diversity of profiles encountered.

Although Portugal has an equalitarian labour law, gender is still an important category in the citizens' participation among different professional domains. That is why social practices and cultural meanings that informs men' but mostly women' labour activities contradict national law. People who work in professional domains that do not fit in the hegemonic symbolic representations cross social and cultural borders. The social construction of gender categories is a central influence in person's constitution processes, structuring their personal, familial and professional life. This study aims to understand the conditioning elements for women' and men' entrance in professional domains connected to gender categories they don't belong within. Cultural elements are passed between generations thus informing people's social identity's, defining gender categories, relating activities to performances "suitable to women" or "suitable to men", making individuals become "natural performers" of particular tasks in specific social places (cf. Comas; Aguilar). Personal and professional formation lies in the acquisition of technical qualifications associated to their gender category, which inform their insertion in the labour market, their performance and progression. However, we can find multiple situations in which individuals come to enter in professional fields socially perceived as belonging to gender categories that are not theirs. This research aims to identify the processes which lead to that kind of situations, where people cross professional barriers imposed by social representations on gender categories. To achieve this objective analyses will be conducted among two professional groups whose actors are in a position of "gender nonconformity in occupations" (cf. Kimmel): men working in the support of educational and health services, and women in technical computing and electronics, in three Portuguese regions (northern, central and southern). Methodologically researchers...

This project is based on the analysis of "family histories" made by 3rd year students of Anthropology at ISCTE since 1989. Its aim is to test the validity of the more common typologies concerning family organization in Portugal.