Graduate Program in History (PPGH/EFLCH/UNIFESP)

The History Department of Unifesp's School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (EFLCH) considers its Graduate Program to be a privileged space to contemplate and produce History, a field understood as an academic discipline relevant to contemporary society. Through curricula of advanced studies that cultivate erudition and rigor in research, the program offers masters students specialized technical training as well as exposure to a broad spectrum of historical writing.

During the reflections carried out internally in recent years, the concept of "displacement" proved to be relevant, capable of articulating the various researches and able to guide a new ​​Concentration Area for the Program. Displacement, here, is understood in its multiple meanings and modulations, and, above all, in the arguments that shape the concept itself when appropriated by historiography. There is a first, more evident sense of movement in space, which, in the case of subjects (re)articulates and re-signifies identities along this path, and, in the case of objects (or goods), also implies reflecting on the appropriations of these objects by various cultures and societies as they move. Both cases propose a reflection on borders and their meanings, and the territories of this circulation. There is also a less evident meaning, but no less concrete for that, when, on the one hand, one thinks of the semantic shifts that occur synchronously and diachronically and are given by social and linguistic disputes, or, on the other, in the material effects caused by changes in discourses and representations when transposed, appropriated and re-signified in different supports and cultural practices. At the same time, if displacement presupposes circulation and movement (of people, things, ideas, words, processes, etc.), it also indicates, by its antithesis (and because it contains the term “place” in the word itself), the idea of ​​adaptation, recreation, resignification, among so many other processes that, based on existing conditions, retranslate what moves, always differentiating it from its new location. We consider that the records on which we historians focus can be expressed in different supports and narratives: they can be codes of conduct, legal and/or institutional regulations, images, objects of material culture, etc., which can shift in time and in space. A dialectic between place and world challenges historians to refine their gaze and seek dialogues and conflicts that can generate local and general translations. The Program, thus reformulated, proposes to value this problematizing dimension as a thematic unity present in the research of its faculty, which is invested with greater meaning if thought of in our own location, living day-to-day displacements of people, knowledge, products and conflicts, now specific to this place and now connected to cultural expressions from other places, we intend to account for the shifts that mark the history of humanity in multiple temporalities and spaces.

The History and Displacements Concentration Area unfolds into three fields/ lines of research: Narratives, Displacements and Connections; Norms, Spaces and Displacements; Displacements, Labor and Experiences.