In addition to their shared history of invasion and colonization, Latin American countries share experiences of democracies whose trajectories are marked by interruptions in the form of dictatorships, or which simply coexist with high levels of various types of violence, many of which are scattered throughout everyday life, even though they mark the lives (and deaths) of specific segments of the population (Jardim; López-Ruiz; Mendéz, 2024). In this context, the Brazilian experience is both exemplary and distinct. It is exemplary in that it is marked by the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2020; Rufer, 2017), in its relationship with national formation, the possibilities and impossibilities of political alliances between fractions of the population, and state dynamics that, whenever aimed at producing a more robust impact on inequalities, especially since the 19th century, derive their foundations from fragile consensus. And it is distinct, since Portuguese colonization and, above all, the weight of slavery in Brazilian society, constituted categories and modes of government that need to be described in their specificity (Foucault, 2004; Souza Lima, 2012), in order to shed light on the challenges of the present, allowing for the deepening of comparative studies.
This panel takes Brazil as a sort of “case study” and its main objective is to explore the methodological gesture of deciphering the manners in which the work of time, weaving together the threads of daily life, memory, and history and sedimenting ways of being, thinking, and existing, constitutes subjects, practices, theoretical questions, archives, and political actions that consist of true existential “knots,” which articulate diverse temporalities, but also diverse geographies, that cannot be described solely on the basis of broad concepts but, on the contrary, need to be demarcated each time. Furthermore, we seek to reflect on how research can be attentive to such work—which sometimes implies procedures that also work with time (to make a slightly displaced reference to Veena Das's proposition, 2020), whether in the form of longitudinal or long-term research, or in the form of revisiting memories, including childhood or intimate ones, and archives.
A common point among the authors is their inquiry into the intertwining of the state and violence after the democratic transition (beginning in 1985) and the achievement of a certain stability in the institutional game (until 2016). In the Brazilian case, one of the expressions of such violence is the constant deaths caused by the police and the massacres - “chacinas (Silva; Santos; Ramos, 2019), which have been undergoing a process of statization (Hirata et al., 2023). When reflecting on this theme from different perspectives and scales, the aim is to explore whether working with time can help us perceive other textures in relation to the either spectral or very concrete presences of colonization, slavery, and dictatorship in the making of the nation and the state.
Adriana Vianna, Museu Nacional-UFRJ - "Weaving together archives on victims and crimes in the context of Brazilian redemocratization"
Taking as its starting point the brutal murder of a Brazilian theater director in the late 1980s, this presentation seeks to reflect on how frameworks of memory, crimes, victims, and political demands are produced in a process of intense transformation in terms of the formal system of government.
The notion of archives is explored here in a varied and deliberately scattered manner. On the one hand, I seek to discuss how, beyond judicial and media archives, the crime was incorporated into the archives of LGBT activist groups that sought to change the way lethal violence against such people was treated in the public arena and, in particular, in the judiciary. On the other hand, taking a fresh look at the judicial process from the present and guided by recent debates on the process of Brazilian redemocratization, I seek traces of the dictatorial regime in the criminal proceedings. These traces take shape from elements of the indictment that were sensitive at that moment of transition to democracy, such as references to paramilitary actions and torture regularly employed by police officers.
The materiality of the archive must thus be placed in a process of constant disengagement. I propose to work with the image of “duress” (Stoler, 2016) that are distributed in a non-linear or totalizing way in the archives, establishing relationships that are neither completely synchronic nor completely diachronic for the understanding of crime/political cases. In addition, I seek to explore the active dimension of our research in the production of these same archives, whether through the connections we establish between different materials and research questions, or through our role in reinforcing processes of memory and forgetting of deaths, victims, and political causes.
Fabiana Jardim, USP - "Everyday life as fabric, childhood memories as threads: theoretical and methodological contributions by José de Souza Martins and Clara Han"
My aim is to reflect on the theoretical and methodological challenges of making legible the nexus between everyday life and history, based on an examination of two books that combine autobiography and social analysis — "Archeology of Social Memory: Memories of a Factory Kid“ by Brazilian sociologist José de Souza Martins, and ”Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War" by Korean-American anthropologist Clara Han. Although the books are quite different from each other, it seems productive to bring them together to consider how both authors draw on memories of their childhood experiences, witnessed scenes, and fragments of history to articulate an understanding not only of their own trajectory or family history, but also to propose a certain understanding of how different spatial and temporal scales give texture to the most intimate relationships and everyday life. It is worth noting that both Martins and Han are theoretically dedicated to the investigation of everyday life. Their books cannot be classified as autobiographies, sociobiographies (Eribon, 2025), or autoethnographies (Bénard Calva, 2019), and do not fit into the genre of testimonial literature either. I propose that looking at these texts allows us to move forward our reflection on how memory studies, based on the notion of post-memory (Hirsch, 2008), and addressing the challenges of “methodological nationalism” (Kennedy & Nugent, 2016), contribute to highlighting the limits of concepts such as generation, immigration, dispossession, social mobility, and testimony when examined from the perspective of everyday life and the fragility of surviving childhood memories.
Milena Mateuzi, UFABC - "Women, Universities, and Memories: The Experience of Access to Higher Education and the (Re)Writing of Peripheral Territories in the City of São Paulo"
This paper reflects on how experience and memory have been articulated in the academic production of women researchers from the peripheral areas of São Paulo (Brazil). Affirmative action policies have enabled the entry of students historically excluded from higher education into undergraduate and graduate programs. Such access has been experienced as a hard-won achievement in a context in which much of the population has lost hope in democracy’s promises to reduce social inequalities. Based on the analysis of master’s and doctoral theses in the social sciences produced by women with this profile, I argue that these researchers have been reconfiguring ways of narrating and remembering peripheral territories by intertwining memories of lived experiences with the historical and political processes that shape these spaces. Their narratives inscribe memory as a field of symbolic and political dispute, evoking intergenerational histories that traverse different moments in the making of São Paulo’s peripheries: the internal migrations of the 1960s and 1970s; community and popular movements of the 1980s; the intensification of urban violence in the 1990s; the hip-hop movement; and activisms, especially Black and peripheral feminisms. They introduce new interpretive layers to established studies on the city and its margins, bringing forth local voices and memories as forms of knowledge. By analyzing these works as writings of the self and of territory, this presentation seeks to understand how they displace epistemic boundaries, destabilizing traditional representations of the periphery, and proposing new collective memories anchored in experiences of struggle and care.
Uvanderson V. da Silva, Fundação Tide Setúbal "Wounded democracy: memories of a bloody decade in the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil"
The 1990s were dilemmatic in Brazil. The end of a long period of dictatorship was sealed with the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution — symbol of a social pact that promised to build a more just and inclusive society. However, the two presidents elected during the decade adopted a neoliberal agenda that was regressive in terms of social policies and the guarantee of rights. The promise of substantive democracy gave way to an exclusionary modernization project that deepened inequalities and made life more precarious. Meanwhile, the repressive machinery of the state and conservative forces in society kept alive the production of the “internal enemy,” now disguised as the fight against crime. The criminalization of poverty and the advance of institutional violence became hallmarks of daily life in urban peripheries. In São Paulo—the epicenter of the new waves of modernization and also of exclusion—homicide rates among young black people and those living in the peripheries reached alarming levels. The southern part of the city, especially the districts of Jardim Ângela, Capão Redondo, and Parque Santo Antônio—known as the “Triangle of Death”—was once considered one of the most violent areas in the world. Bodies of young people shot on the sidewalks, shootouts between criminal groups, and brutal police operations were part of everyday life, which denounced this reality as an expression of the dehumanizing foundations of the Brazilian democratic project. This paper proposes to revisit the 1990s in light of these multiple deaths and massacres, examining the newspaper Notícias Populares — a symbol of a sensationalist approach to this reality — as a lens to understand how violence became a public narrative and a social pedagogy of fear.
20260729T110020260729T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires1.16. Revisiting archives, memories and collective repertoire: methodological implications or the work of timeSV101MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
