Proposal

The Graduate Program in Culture and Territorialities (PPCULT), linked to UFF’s Institute of Art and Social Communication, was approved in 2012 by CAPES, having received, in its first four-yearly evaluation (2013-2016), score 4. It results from the demand of professors and students of  Universidade Federal Fluminense for a greater investment in research and studies in the field of culture and territorialities, given its growing importance in contemporary times. Congregating professors from various areas (such as Cultural Production, Cultural Studies and Media, Education, Anthropology, History, Linguistics and Literature, Sociology, Communication, etc.), aligned their research fields and reflections related to the study of culture in its multiple meanings, especially with regard to discussions on spatialities and territorialities, both material and symbolic, the new Graduate Program finds its place within an interdisciplinary perspective, large area of CAPES in which it is also inserted.

 

The Program, however, has its base in the Department of Art, where is located the undergraduate course in Cultural Production (from which come most of the professors who constitute the graduate faculty), and will have the support of professors from the course in Media Studies, of the Department of Cultural Studies and Media. Both courses/departments integrate the Institute of Art and Social Communication of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (IACS/UFF). In its lines of research, classes and projects, the intersection intended by the new Program is to gather under a multidisciplinary bias, researchers who favor discussions about culture in its relationship with territorialities and its multiple agents and practices.

 

Culture, as a strategic value, has assumed in the last decade a relevant and central role, giving current society the features that define contemporaneity. Thus, the creation of a graduate program that engenders culture and excels in interdisciplinarity answers an increased demand and a significant gap regarding stricto sensu higher education in Brazil.

 

If we understand that culture is a constitutive part of all social practice and that in contemporary times this dimension occupies an increasingly central place, we believe that investigating the issue of culture is fundamental today to map forms of political action. In this sense, we have double overlap between culture and politics: first, the production of meaning is the founding dimension of the political struggle, that is, one must understand the forms of political action in its relation to cultural practices; second, and increasingly, this association is externalized and assumed, leading to the constitution of expressive cultural policies, in which the meaning of culture slides between a form of political action - as intervention in the world -, a form of construction of subjectivities and personal and group identities and a form of commodity, within a logic of productivity, distribution, consumption, fruition and disposal.

 

Such overlaps are consolidated and deepened within the reality of contemporary, multiple and complex societies, in which space and time relations are continuously altered by cultural practices. Therefore, there is a strong intersection between the field of culture and its multiple spatial dimensions, both in material and symbolic terms, assuming procedural relations with the territories in which such relationships take place. In this sense, to reflect on territorialities, understanding that territories are spaces under construction, places in the process of acquiring meaning, objects of disputes and negotiations, in which culture plays a central role, is also a strategic axis of our proposal. Especially if we consider how, in contemporary times, the spaces of cities - their weavings, the social and virtual networks they encompass, their multiple uses, forms of appropriation, exclusion, inclusion and struggle -, are crossed by cultural practices, we can conclude that culture and territoriality are quintessentially interdisciplinary concepts, and require plural methodological strategies that are related to the reflexive tradition of the different areas from which the professors that make up this Graduate Program originate.

 

For these reasons, the Graduate Program in Culture and Territorialities is strategic. We must also consider that the II National Conference of Culture (CNC), in 2010, outlined some priority guidelines, including the expansion of studies in the area, to allow and enhance the public institutionalization of the cultural field, as indicated by the creation of the National System of Culture (SNC) and other fronts of Public Policies for Culture. Therefore, in line with contemporaneity, Culture Policies have increasingly demanded public administrators, educators, researchers and analysts with professional improvement in the cultural field.

 

But beyond that, to expand research opportunities in the area means valuing the further theoretical development that is reflected in the qualification of actions and debate in the field. Thus, faculty’s experience in researching the areas related to the main themes of this graduate program - Culture and Territorialities -, with their interdisciplinary backgrounds, constitutes a differentiated capital for developing this project, which requires complex and multiple reflective perspectives, such as those being developed by these professors, to encompass a socio-cultural reality of enormous complexity, in a constant process of change and updating.
In a world of fluid borders in the field of culture and in the dimensions of time and space, training researchers capable of reflecting on this reality is a fundamental requirement to strengthen understanding in contemporary times.