Presentation
In Portuguese society, resorting to the concept ‘nation’ often suggests overlapping between a community, a culture and a territorial map. This conceptual ‘certainty’ contrasts with other complex categories that seek to characterize, in the field, and from present reality, social diversity. From this crossing of interrogations and misunderstandings rises a notion of restrict citizenship, which describes the identity of those that fit under official definitions. For the ‘others’, that remain out of this ‘social imagination’ the categories used – diasporic, migrated, refugee, exiled, amongst others – incorporate this marginality. This contrast of belongings puts in evidence the relation between citizen fixity, its normality and its interaction with the movable, mobile, the nation’s delocalized borders. The ‘strangeness’ encountered by the nation’s process of construction is someone who, by reasons of classification, was not ‘officially’ allowed in the world of citizenship. The violence of this process results in the conception of the idea of citizenship as a static entity, of the problematic nature of identity, of the positivism between territory and a people and the fixity of borders.

Parting from this theoretical framework, we aim, in this course, to overcome the normative and legal issues and question the narratives that build up Portugal through this ‘conceptual certainty’, as well as the possibilities of understanding the ‘nation’ as a ambivalent category and in permanent redefinition, reflecting the political, social, economic, cultural and educational transformations deriving from the various diasporic movements that cross our contemporary society.

Programme

Day #1
Friday, October 3rd

Day #2
Saturday, October 4th

At the end of the course a participation certificate shall be delivered