Research Areas

This research area explores crime, punishment, and human rights as central issues of contemporary social experience. Understanding, analyzing, and explaining these problems are essential components of any critical reflection on life in society. Beyond legal and police frameworks, crime and punishment are examined as moral and political devices—mobilized by control agencies to both fulfill demands for rights and reproduce existing forms of domination. Specifically, this area investigates the processes, forms, and consequences of victimization, including racial and gender-based violence, as well as the impact of policing on the exclusion, segregation, and surveillance of groups perceived as “at risk.” From the perspective of institutional responses, the focus lies on the operation of the criminal justice system in contexts of violence, with particular attention to the forms of rationality it deploys in decision-making. This area also promotes critical studies on prisons and the broader mechanisms of punishment, understood as both responses to and producers of the criminal phenomenon. As such, it encompasses research on the lived realities, experiences, and dynamics of incarceration, as well as the discourses that sustain and legitimize its ongoing use.

• Clóvis Roberto Zimmermann
• Eduardo Paes-Machado
• Luiz Claudio Lourenço
• Mariana Thorstensen Possas
• Riccardo Cappi

This research area explores the intersections between space, participation, and citizenship, focusing on how conflicts, collective actions, and spatial dynamics shape social policy and the demand for rights. With an emphasis on citizenship practices and political agency as they manifest across different spatial contexts, this line of research includes studies aimed at understanding both the relationship between the State and civil society and how these interactions mediate social demands, decision-making processes, and the design and implementation of public policies. In this context, it promotes research in the following areas: (a) disputes, negotiations, and coalitions among diverse actors and their strategies of action in urban and rural settings; (b) the right to the city and responses to racism in land tenure and other forms of socio-spatial segregation; (c) the relationship between urban practices and the implementation of segregation technologies that foster privatization, intensify surveillance, and threaten democratic rights; (d) experiences of popular participation and the characteristics of public administration, governance, and urban and regional planning; (e) conflicts in the formulation and implementation of policies targeting different sectors of civil society; and (f) articulations, connections, and comparisons across local, national, and transnational levels in the study of institutions, social movements, and the development of social policies.

• Alvino Oliveira Sanches Filho
• Anete Brito Leal Ivo
• Clóvis Roberto Zimmermann
• Maíra Kubik Taveira Mano
• Maria Gabriela Hita
• Mariana Aparecida dos Santos Panta
• Mariano Perelman
• Rafael de Aguiar Arantes
• Sue Angélica Serra Iamamoto

This research area investigates the co-production of knowledge, techniques, and environments that give rise to multiple modes of existence. Adopting a transdisciplinary perspective, it welcomes studies that explore these processes either broadly or within specific contexts—such as health, religion, science, ecology, and rurality. The analytical focus includes relational and transversal dynamics across these domains, such as: nature and society, human and non-human, technique and politics, modern science and ancestral knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity, body and affect. Building on these analytical frameworks, this research area promotes investigations into sociotechnical practices and modes of coexistence within their specific contexts of emergence and operation, examining the variations, tensions, disputes, and overlaps enacted by interacting agents. With a broader concern for the viability of life on—and of—the planet, it also fosters critical inquiries into plural modes of knowledge and existence, scientific controversies, technological mediations, new development paradigms, diverse conceptualizations of the environment, the political ecology of the Anthropocene, and critiques of speciesism and human exceptionalism.

This research area addresses cultural practices, systems of representation, and forms of sociability across diverse empirical contexts. Its areas of interest include: (a) cultural industries and mass society; (b) fields of artistic production—such as literature, cinema, music, theater, fashion, visual and graphic arts, gastronomy, and architecture; (c) popular traditions and manifestations, along with their intersections with cultural policies; (d) phenomena related to digital information and communication technologies, including sociability mediated by online networks; (e) policies for the preservation of collective memory and cultural heritage; and (f) consumption practices and lifestyles. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, this line of research promotes critical analyses of ideologies, norms, values, tastes, beliefs, rituals, customs, and expressive forms shared by various social groups, always considering the power dynamics at play in hierarchies, classifications, distinctions, and polarizations. In the field of digital culture, it aims to understand emerging narratives, actions, sociotechnical realities, processes of subjectivation, and the grammars shaping the practices of users, communities, and platforms. It also welcomes studies in computational social science and digital humanities, encouraging the development of methodological repertoires suited to these evolving sociocultural environments. Finally, this axis explores how cultural practices intersect with markers such as race, class, gender, generation, and territory, investigating how these intersections challenge contemporary social sciences to develop new explanatory paradigms for the artistic and cultural sphere.

• Alan Delazeri Mocellim
• Ana Rodrigues Cavalcanti Alves
• Antônio da Silva Câmara
• Débora Previatti
• Leandro de Paula Santos
• Leonardo Fernandes Nascimento
• Lucas Amaral de Oliveira

This research area develops theoretical and empirical studies on work and social inequalities in their multiple forms and dimensions. Work is analyzed through the lens of its historical and conceptual transformations, serving as a central reference point for understanding the social reproduction of workers, as well as the production of poverty, inequalities, and vulnerabilities. The line of research articulates and promotes studies on the organization and processes of labor, labor markets, and diverse manifestations of social inequality across urban and rural, national and international contexts. It also seeks to understand the historical asymmetries of capitalist society and its transformations, particularly those involving systems of oppression based on gender, generation, race, and class. At the intersection of these various contexts, the axis investigates the roles of the family, the state, businesses, markets, and solidarity networks—both as mechanisms that contribute to the reproduction of inequalities and as actors in the formulation of public policies and social practices. This research area is structured around five analytical frameworks: (a) work and power relations; (b) work and the social question; (c) work and the reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities; (d) economy and social reproduction, with a focus on markets, economic agents, and power dynamics; and (e) work and its intersections with sexual, generational, racial, and class-based inequalities.

• Bruno Costa Barreiros
• Iracema Brandão Guimarães
• Jair Batista da Silva
• Maria da Graça Druck de Faria
• Maíra Kubik Taveira Mano
• Mariano Perelman
• Paula Cristina da Silva