In June 2023, the Prime Minister of Portugal Antonio Costa made a state visit to Luanda where he visited the premises of the future Museum of the Struggle for Liberation, located in the former Casa de Reclusão, place of imprisonment for several protagonists of Angolan independence. As this was the first time the project was made public, Costa's visit was filled with political symbolism that is relevant in the context of post-colonial Lusophone cultural and heritage diplomacy. But, taking into account that the space in question also embodies a history of extreme post-colonial violence, what are the epistemological and political costs of the project? Based on the case study of the new museum, we propose to debate the processes of public ritualization and heritage performatization of the post-colonial Lusophone space. To this end, we will use the operative concept of “heritage spectacle” to discuss the actors, relationships and representations surrounding heritage processes.

The TIS - Teatro de Inclusão Social project will develop artistic work for social inclusion, with adults with mental illness alongside various situations of social vulnerability, through involvement in cultural and artistic manifestations improving their self-esteem and self-concept enriching and providing the bip/zip neighbourhoods with culture and new experiences.  

The TIS - Teatro de Inclusão Social project will develop artistic work for social inclusion, with adults with mental illness alongside various situations of social vulnerability, through involvement in cultural and artistic manifestations improving their self-esteem and self-concept enriching and providing the bip/zip neighbourhoods with culture and new experiences.  

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 the context of the European Union, migration-related issues have become of paramount importance in recent years for governmental activity, raising the need to study, categorize and support migrant populations and to foster their integration. In order to create and expand a social care network responsible for monitoring and managing immigrants, funding has been made available, and impressive efforts have been made at both national and supra-national levels in policy development and programmes implementation. These programmes, in our perspective, revolve around what we will call the vulnerability/risk dichotomy. On the one hand, there is a representation which often links immigrants with deviance, social insecurity, social inability, and criminality, thus constituting a risk for society. On the other hand, they are also conceived as being in trouble, victims of a traumatic displacement, needy and unprotected, in a permanent state of vulnerability. This dichotomy constructs the idea that there is something inherently 'problematic' about being a migrant, thus requiring solutions to control 'risk behaviours' and to look after 'vulnerable conditions'. The main goal of the project is thus, rather than taking for granted vulnerability and risk as a natural condition in migration, to provide a critical inquiry into the social care sector targeting migrants and promoting their integration in contemporary Portugal, providing a much needed assessment of these interventions, and witnessing - through an ethnographic analysis of several specific contexts - how these policies work in practice and how they affect migrants populations. The project will investigate how these interventions aim at building mainstream forms of citizenship and personhood, commonly resting on unexpressed ethnocentric and culture-specific moral assumptions. Consequently, we intend to document and assess the institutional, social, and cultural violence migrants have to face when the social sector interven...