AGGRIN – Generative bodies: from aggression to the insurgency. Contributions to a decolonial pedagogy. PTDC/CED-EDG/3644/2021-FCT – (2023-2026)

The AGGRIN project is part of studies on racism from a decolonial perspective. It deals with discrimination and insurgency, through the study of the place that the bodies of racialized citizens occupy in these processes. We recognize that non-bodies in contexts of dominant whiteness, have always been the first “loci” of domination in power relations, in slave processes, in colonial and post-colonial processes, in patriarchal relations, in sexual domination and in the control of their subjectivities and knowledge.

The project will focus its attention on one of the most common forms of racism, i.e. surreptitious aggression, named according to historical and cultural contexts of aversive racism, everyday racism or micro aggression. This surreptitious aggression is associated with the bodily materiality of racialized people. AGRRIN will study the specifics of this manifestation of racism and how this same corporality also supports multiple forms of insurgency. Finally, it is intended that a better understanding of these complex processes is seen as a contribution to overcoming them, in support of a decolonial pedagogy.

The project is part of the theoretical and social intervention framework the School of Thought of Sociomuseology, as Public Science, within the field of Social Sciences. The project has a partnership with the UNESCO Chair “Education, Citizenship and Cultural Diversity” managed by the Department of Museology/CeiED, whose activity of a participatory and dialogical nature is consistent with the SDGs 4,5 and 16.

The project is centred on the black and Afro-descendant population residing in Portugal, which is subject to multiple forms of racial discrimination, highlighted in the 2012 UN report, such as inequalities in access to education, public services, employment, racial profiling in the justice system and police violence. In the last 5 years, this situation has worsened, calling for the renewal of studies on citizenship, education and cultural diversity from a perspective of human rights and cognitive justice.

Coordination: Chairhoder Judite Primo