Interesses científicos do coordenador  (Jan 2006)

Estou "agarrado" a dois novos mestrados de que sou coordenador. "Instituições e Justiça Social, Gestão e Desenvolvimento" é um deles, que vai abrir inscrições para 2006/07, e "Risco, Trauma e Sociedade" é o outro cuja primeira edição decorre em 2005/06, ambos no ISCTE. No primeiro pretende-se abrir uma porta da sociologia para o direito e serviços sociais com vista ao desenvolvimento da gestão social e no segundo para a saúde pública e a estratégia. Temas fortes justiça social num e trauma no outro.

Alguns temas sobre que me debruço são:

1. "Os Erros de Damásio" - artigo sobre teoria do conhecimento, usando o trabalho de António Damásio (neuro-biólogo) como referência (tem versão em  inglês)

2. "Espírito proibicionista" - primeiro livro sobre uma aplicação prática do conceito de estados-de-espírito à análise social, no prelo.

3. "Espírito moderno" - dois artigos sobre a dualidade de carácter (violenta e pacifista) dos projectos de modernidade

 4. "Anomia e história recente das políticas prisionais em Portugal" - artigo publicado + tese de agregação

5. "Exclusão social, violência e crise penitenciária" - projecto de cadeira + artigo

6. "Justiça, medo e segredo - o caso dos imigrantes em Lisboa" - trabalho a realizar de apresentação de alguns resultados de pesquisa em curso

Estou muito interessado em abrir horizontes na sociologia prisional que faço, que não entendo como especialidade mas como campo particular de aplicação de teorias gerais. Haver a oportunidade de ser apresentado a eventuais parceiros, seria uma boa notícia.

Ler AQUI (pdf 130K) apresentação do estudo "Prisão de Não Nacionais"

Embodying Sociology  -  The two cultures and the real thing

The 80´s developed the Sociology of the body and the Sociology of emotions. Both thematized “embodiment”.  That means that both kinds of research understand that traditional specialized social theories are not useful to understand body or emotion, as study objects. Never the less, any of the two approaches had been able to produce the theoretical turn needed to understand what “embodiment” really means to actual sociology frontiers.

My proposal is to consider a review of classic sociological intuitions about embodiment (revolutionary spirit into proletariat people, spirit of capitalism into bourgeoisie people, social conscientiousness into anomic modern people) in order to understand how to resume these abandoned theoretical research lines, taking in account the very new understanding of cerebral neurobiology of emotions and feelings, personal and social.

Ethnic Minorities and Criminology Justice

By June it will be ended a 3 years qualitative research about what immigrants in Portugal can say about Justice? We record 70 double interviews to three different “communities” of immigrants (Africans,  Brazilians and East Europeans in Lisbon) and we conclude that fear is the name of the main emotion and felling that most of the immigrant express when they are asked by a young and physically fragile researcher.

The interviews revealed other aspects of the relations between immigrants and Justice, such as the potential use of the media to help the quest of justice, the heavy silences about the past – and the travelling adventure in particular – and some revolt about the quotidian injustices.

The research team is now resuming all available data and analysis to be able to write down the research report. I propose my self to present some of the main results in Stockolm.

Modernity and Modernities

The societies have been looked as scientific objects. That is why the paradigm of reversibility is dominant, as it is at Natural Sciences, and spiritual phenomena not reversible, as memory or transformation or growing or dying, put aside. Even if it is a everyday experience people dying because they want to, people refusing to grow older, remaining juvenile as much as possible, till elderly ages, warriors becoming peace makers and the other way around, people losing their orientation for living as they lost memory.

Modernity, as Science and Social Science too, has a positive side of reforming the world manipulated by reversible and simpler knowledge, easier to supervise technological applications. Modernity has a grey side of complot and ideological secrecy about understanding irreversible phenomenon, even – as Prigogine remarks – if the latter are much more common as the former. Optimistic perspectives reveal the positive side of modernity, let call it modernization theories. Sceptics perspectives refers to the grey side of modernity, let call it modernist approach, witch remain more aesthetic than scientific, more emotional than rational. The way Social Sciences a Natural Sciences are dependent of science-technological interest and from their funding programs pushes that way. That is why studies in irreversibility paradigm are behind the reversible paradigm studies: the latter are cheaper, more utilitarian and (above all?) do not discuss real time decision making. In the, Science should suppose, all rests. The reverse is abnormal.

Philosofical Ideas in Sociology

António Damásio, the neuro-biologist of University of Iwoa, is one of the strongest inspirations for my theoretical innovative work. His last book “Looking for Spinosa” makes me a strong impression. That is why I wrote a paper about what can sociology use of the innovative Damásio insights about his own discipline and propose back some comments about the way these lessons can be useful to try interdisciplinary social anchorage of social emotions, discussed by the author, at social theory level.

Towards a Sociology of Human Rights 

Sociology traditions put it in the middle of a cross made by politics, economics and culture studies, as structural-functionalism propose. The “socio-men” are seen as adult, active, modern professional human beings “normaly”. Every body which do not match with that kind of understanding – children, disable people, aging and excluded people – are, from this point of view, abnormal. Eventually pertinent to develop specializes case studies or even specialized studies of “minorities”, such as women or Asian people.

That means that sociology traditional developments have not been useful to denounce ideologies used to split parts of human kind from the right to dignity and solidarity, as it is recognized to the main image of the right normal socio-man. Western sociologists usually conceive, for instance, the man kind as warless and ungerless people, even many people in Western world are not like that.

To deal with “Exclusive Society” it is need to use both kind of theories, those mainly used by traditional sociology and others, that refer not to politics, economics and culture but rather to rethoric power, bio-medics, psycho-sociology of quotidian decision making, live policy as Giddens call it.

Sociologia dividida entre a modernização e o modernismo

Modernização

                                                              Sociologia

Modernismo