CITCOM Research Seminars - Key Issues in Contemporary Societies

CITCOM – Citizenship, Culture and Memory is a research group at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon that investigates the key issues in contemporary societies. CITCOM’s work is characterised by a broad and flexible epistemological and methodological approach to these themes, combining cultural, textual and visual analysis with archival research, sociological and historiographical enquiry, ethnography and artistic practice.

In 2023, CITCOM launched a new cycle of Research Seminars, with the aim to disseminate the work of its researchers and that of researchers the group’s members relate to and promote peer discussion and the development of new avenues for investigation and analysis.

As part of the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution, CITCOM also organizes the Research Seminars 50 years of April: Citizenship, Culture, and Memory.

The seminars are open to the general public.

Calendar 2023/2024

• Echoes of the 25th of April in the Portuguese Cinema of Austerity - 28 June 2024, 4PM, Online.

Speaker: Iván Villarmea Álvarez , USC.

A The Carnation Revolution did not just happen on 25 April 1974; it continues to happen in the memory of the people who were there, and could even happen every day in the lives of Portuguese citizens, if public policies went in a different direction. So what remains of the 25th of April in the 21st century? How has cinema represented this experience in the present, more than thirty or forty years later?

This presentation proposes an analysis of the unavoidable, but also fading, presence of the Revolution in films such asStill Life (Susana de Sousa Dias, 2005), Slightly Smaller than Indiana (Daniel Blaufuks, 2006), Horse Money  (Pedro Costa, 2014), Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes, 2015) ou The Nothing Factory (Pedro Pinho, 2017).
 

Access: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/97571211628?pwd=jtI6YNfOUioxSLWhniXbzo0F8XkjPb.1

Meeting ID: 975 7121 1628

Password: 161887  

• Documentary in the colonial era: from scholarly and institutional collaboration to the activation of the film archive - 22 February 2024, 4PM, FLUL, room B112.B

Speaker: Miguel Fernández Labayen, UC3M.

This presentation draws on the research project “Institutional documentary and amateur cinema in the colonial era: analysis and uses” (PID2021-123567NB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation/State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund.
 

In partnership with Filmoteca Española, the project identifies, documents and analyzes the hundreds of productions shot in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea in order to map a fundamental part of Spanish audiovisual history that has been usually neglected and ask about the legacy of colonial history in the present. This talk will tackle the provisional results of the project and will address the methodological, theoretical, ethical and organizational challenges of such an ambitious enterprise. Miguel Fernández Labayen is associate professor in the department of Communication and Media Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where he is a member of the research group Tecmerin and the Institute of Spanish Cinema.

 

• Mídias e memórias: Perspectivas multidimensionais da política cultural luso-brasileira (1941-1974) - 30 November 2023, 4PM, FLUL, room B112.B

Speaker: Gisella Serrano, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.

The next CITCOM Seminar will take place on 30/11/2023 at 4pm in Room B112.B at FLUL. The speaker will be Gisella Serrano, a researcher in the CITCOM - Citizenship, Culture and Memory group at the Centre for Comparative Studies at FLUL. The presentation will be entitled ‘Mídias e memórias: Perspectivas multidimensionais da política cultural luso-brasileira (1941-1974)’.
 

The aim of this presentation is to analyse, from different perspectives, the initiatives of Portuguese-Brazilian cultural policy through the Portuguese-Brazilian Exchange Section between 1941 and 1974. Aimed at promoting book publishing, the press, magazines, radio, television and the arts in general, this section is a key point in understanding cultural and intellectual relations between Brazil and Portugal.

 

• Um passo digital atrás do outro: O início de uma jornada etnográfica pelo mundo online do Vale da Amoreira - 12 de outubro de 2023, 16H00, FLUL, sala B112.H

Speaker: Murilo Guimarães, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.

In this seminar, the research strategy adopted to enter and participate in the social networks of residents of Vale da Amoreira, in the municipality of Moita, district of Setúbal, belonging to the Lisbon Metropolitan Zone, will be presented.
This anthropological work is part of the Constellations of Memory Project: a multidirectional study of migration and post-colonial memory,and initially aims to understand how the internet is used to facilitate the movement of people, ideas and things between the Vale, other regions of Portugal and ancient Portuguese colonies in Africa.
The seminar will seek to demonstrate the ethical limits and possibilities opened up by the digital world, with a view to using the ethnographic method especially suitable for creating scientific data on social relationships established through digital platforms and the use of the most diverse technological devices.

Zoom access: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/95125523301?pwd=bWZucElTUEZtUWFrL3RvQkhxQ1c0dz09

 

• Imagens como cicatrizes: realizadoras ibéricas e o arquivo colonial - 1 June 2023.

Speaker: Anna Fonoll Tassier, visiting PhD student from the Universidad Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.

On 1 June 2023 the CITCOM Seminar cycle of the research group Citizenship, Culture and Memory, of the FLUL Centre for Comparative Studies, organised its first edition.

The speaker was Anna Fonoll Tassier, a visiting PhD student from the Universidad Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, who integrated the Cinema, Audiovisual and Contemporary Imaginaries cluster at CEComp.

Anna's research focuses on the work of Portuguese and Spanish non-fiction filmmakers, including Filipa César, Salomé Lamas, Sally G. Dewar and Irene Gutiérrez, who have explored feminist modes of production in their works and reflect on the colonial memory of both countries. Anna's presentation was entitled 'Imagens como cicatrizes: realizadoras ibéricas e o arquivo colonial'.