Research Project: Political Thought, Utopia, and the Concept of the City
Considering that the thinkers who shaped Western political thought were almost always concerned with proposing and/or analyzing the form and design of real or idealized cities, this project aims to collect and analyze proposals by classical authors in this regard, from Antiquity to the present day.
Research Project: Political action, social movements, and urban regimes
The direct participation of a population in local politics sometimes opens up new avenues for the development of urban policies that favor civil society, directly impacting the correlation of forces and coalitions forged by key political actors. The aim is to examine these associative forms in terms of their capacity to generate alternatives from below, in the form of pressure and contestation of government policies or in the production of their own territorial alternatives, as well as their potential impact on the reconfiguration of the urban fabric.
Research Project: Institutional alternatives at the federal level: experimentalism and innovation at the subnational level
Studies current political literature related to experimentalism and institutional imagination in order to contribute not only to the interpretation of the existing structure, but above all to imagine a possible adjacent structure with the potential to structurally reorganize society based on changes in Brazilian politics and economics.
Research Project: The Internet and the Democratic Crisis at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Investigates the hypothesis that the historically unprecedented concentration of capital in large strategic transnational corporations supported by the intensive use of digital network technologies (‘Big Techs’) has led to the degeneration of capitalism and democracy in the post-Cold War world.
Research Project: Brazil in the contemporary global economy
Investigates the political and economic prospects for Brazil based on an interpretation of the transformations in the global economy resulting from globalization, as well as their relationship with the role played by the country in the international division of labor.
Research Project: Nationalism and Confederalism in Kurdistan: The dispute over the direction of Kurdish politics between the KDP and the PKK.
Investigates the current political context of Kurdistan through an institutional and political analysis of the two experiences of self-government carried out by the Kurds. One in northern Iraq and the other in northern Syria. One of the experiences is based on direct democracy and the creation of local political councils, while the other aims to form a nation state. The unfolding of this local political dispute has profound consequences for the entire region.
Research Project: Inclusive education policy or bilingual schools?
Throughout human history, deaf people have always been marginalized. Reports say that many were killed or enslaved simply because they were deaf. The education of deaf people has always been linked to a clinical-therapeutic mindset, that is, education has always been used as a tool to “normalize” deaf people. With the emergence of eugenic thinking, the idea of sterilizing deaf people was present and defended by a fear that a new human “race” would be created, a deaf race. Thus, this pseudoscience ended up influencing the education offered to these people. This work seeks to analyze which ideas influenced the two models of education for the deaf, inclusive and bilingual, as well as analyzing which interests were behind our inclusive education project.
Research Project: Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy and Political Participation in the City of Niterói.
Research on identity and political movements within the scope of the “perception of democracy” project, developed in the city of Niterói, seeking to understand the democratic crisis based on how citizens of Niterói view and understand democracy. A logical induction effort that aims to contribute to political analyses of the rise of far-right movements and to the development of truly democratic solutions within the most recent Brazilian context.
Research Project: The Transformations of Capitalism in Digital Globalization
The contemporary political-economic scenario is marked by the transformations of capitalism in the context of the digital world, especially after 2008, with the advance of neoliberal logic and the consolidation of Big Tech companies, driven by the exponential growth of data flow and the centrality of global financial capital. This dynamic has led to a profound reconfiguration of the global landscape, influencing the role of the state on the international stage. The post-2008 context opens the way for new interpretations of how capitalist structures manipulate public policies to benefit their private interests and expand their bases of accumulation.
Research Project: Are HDI and budget all that matter? An analysis of municipal education in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, based on IDEB and HDI.
Studies the relationship between municipal education in the city of Niterói and the metrics used by the national policy to encourage education, such as the IDEB and IDHM indices, seeking to understand whether purely quantitative parameters would be effective in promoting educational development.