nascer.pt - the Laboratory for the Social Studies on Childbirth is a permanent research unit, launched in 2017 and hosted by CIES-IUL. Its aim is to foster knowledge about the conditions and characteristics of childbirth in Portugal, to contribute to the consolidation of the Sociology of childbirth and, at the same time, to develop synergies between structures and multidisciplinary approaches in the study of childbirth, both at national and international level. Through the production and dissemination of scientific information, nascer.pt comes to improve the discussion around policies, practices and paradigms of the childbirth.

  The main aim of the Success at School through Volunteering - SAS project is to expose youngsters affected by early school leaving and living in difficult areas to a pedagogical approach through a training course meant to valorize a voluntary involvement in identifying the relevant skills and competences acquired through volunteering. As a direct result of the training proposed to youngsters they will be able to express their voluntary experience in terms of learning outcomes and so prepare to return to school. This training course will be supported by pedagogical mentoring in order for professionals working with youngsters (teachers, youth workers) to identify and value the skills and competences that will be necessary for them to value the non formal and informal learning acquired though volunteering and find a way back to school.

Our principal aim is to describe, analyze and compare new super-diverse convivial contexts, as they relate to the process of migrations shaping new cultural realms. Our approach does not involve the idealization of harmonic intercultural relations but considers convivial contexts as new fields of intercultural tensions and interactions as an attempt to understand their dynamics and the social, historic and personal factors that lead to willingness to coexist with ethnic heterogeneity or to reject it. Consequently, it envisions applying an innovative framework to understanding intercultural relations among national and migrant populations. From the perspective of social topography, the new convivial cultures are not associated with a specific geographic space. They correspond to different public contexts in which people with links to various ethnic or cultural groups interact. The research will focus on formal/informal settings linked to distinct social functions in each city: Leisure & spaces dedicated to religious practices; Market/shopping area (open-air or indoor market frequented by various ethnic and cultural groups); School/education (where intercultural relations take place between generations and groups-key for overseeing societal evolution of intercultural dialogue); These spaces are important for grasping the real meaning of intercultural relations because as Amin stated, even if “ the national frame of racial and ethnic relations remains important, much of the negotiation of difference occurs at the very local level, through everyday experiences and encounters”.

The central purpose of the research is to relate school results with a series of variables characterising the pupils and their families in order to measure their effect on these results. We plan to analyse the results achieved in national 4th, 6th and 9th grade exams considering the effects, on one hand, of the pupils’ sex, place of birth and nationality and, on the other hand, the class, place of birth and nationality of their parents. Subsidiarily, we will identify schools with dissimilar results but very similar student populations in terms of social condition and the national origin of their families, and explore some aspects of the “school effect” (leadership profile, education plan and organisation of classes and periods) on achievement or failure.