Coordinator: Susana de Matos Viegas
Vice-coordinator: João Afonso Baptista

The Diversities research group focus on contemporary tensions and challenges to social and personal vulnerabilities, in multiple sociocultural, economic and political contexts, namely labour, racialisation, territorialities, migration, health, urban and environment studies as key future-oriented issues. We develop empirical, mostly ethnographic research in multiple settings, in Portuguese-speaking countries.

The Research Group is mainly composed of anthropologists and other social scientists engaged in fieldwork and archival research aiming at comparative ethnographic analysis and anthropological theory thinking. We foster maximum synergies among its members, facilitating optimal integration between research and advanced teaching, namely through the PhD Program in Anthropology, and the Master Course in Brazilian Studies, also collaborating in the PhD in Migration Studies and Development Studies.

Keywords

• Labour and racializations, migrations, displacements
• Bodypolitics, technoscience and health
• Territorialities and human-environment approaches
• Ethnography and theory

Diversities Research Group has reframed its title in 2022, from Identities, Cultures, Vulnerabilities, maintaining however the three clusters that organize its research:

Racializations of Labour. The production of racialized categories and racialized lives in colonial and post-colonial societies. This cluster was enriched by an ERC Research project The Color of Labor.
Place Matters. The study of territorialities, place and displacements in different contexts, from urban contexts to indigenous people settings, considering environmental conditions as key aspects to understand contemporary life.
Embodiments & Materialities. Objects and corporeal practices as gateways to the study of social processes -- micropolitics, lifelong aspirations, positioning strategies, networking, identity narratives, and lived experiences.

Activities of the RG include: i) Workshop of Ethnography, aimed at debating current challenges to ethnographic practice and to the writing of ethnography; ii) LabPub (Laboratory of publications), an internal activity aimed at a collaborative work in discussing papers ready for publication; iii) Seminars of the GI where work in progress is discussed, mainly by international visiting fellows; iv) Colloquium of the GI where members present their work to a larger public. Each year these activities gain different coordinators and formats, released in our external website https://ics-antropologia.pt/