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"Identidades Sociais e Diferenciação/Social Identities and Differentiation"
This group’s main research objective is to assemble researchers who work on the processes of identification and differentiation at both the individual and social levels. These processes will be researched and analyzed as matters of structure and agency, i.e., as constituted within material and symbolic circumstances that set the stage for actors’ agency, while not precluding the latter’s autonomy and inventiveness. Processes of identification and differentiation are understood to be simultaneously both material and symbolic; they take place in contested and dynamic social fields for the construction of emotions, the management of everyday life, the outlining of life projects, the negotiation of relationships, changes in social institutions, and for their relationship with wider social and political structures. The researchers’ projects are diverse in their nature and scope, and can independently thrive on their own worth. Social identity and differentiation are not understood as code words for traditional analytical levels such as social organization, but rather also include such diverse constructs as emotions, biography, consumption, work, modes of artistic production, marginalized or ostracized practices, bodily resistance and empowerment, parallel forms of authority and so forth. Articulation, dialogue, and the building of a common ground between projects will, therefore, have to be done at a higher level – that is the level of methodological and theoretical construction. This is seen as a positive and constructive (rather than as a defensive or expedient solution) perspective for handling research diversity and allowing for experimenting with new forms of theory building – forms that will hopefully help to better understand contemporary processes of identity formation that are in dire need of good ethnography and agile theoretical formulations.
