about

about

Collective actions – the coordination and mobilization of individual or group efforts related to shared interests and objectives – are important processes in the formation of social live in all historical periods. However, the processes of social mobilization and organization are not automatic effects or outcomes of shared social conditions, collective deprivations or structural constrictions. Therefore, it is analytically fundamental to consider the mechanisms which produce collective action - comprehending how they are activated and sustained - and to analyse the outcomes of this phenomena.

Based in these considerations, the Research Group Associations, Contestation and Engagement (GPACE) aims to develop a research agenda around the following questions: 1) How to explain the emergency and sustenance of collective action and associations? 2) How do associative practices assume a contentious feature or meaning? 3) Which are the effects and outcomes produced by associative and contentious practices and how one can understand these outcomes in terms of cultural, political, economical and social changes? 4) Why do individuals engage themselves in associative practices and in contentious actions and how this engagement affects their lives? 1) Como explicar a emergência e a sustentação dos processos de ação coletiva e de associação? 2) A partir de quais problemas e processos as práticas associativas assumem um caráter/sentido contestador? 3) Quais os efeitos ou resultados que as práticas de associação e contestação produzem e como podemos entender esses efeitos em termos de mudanças culturais, políticas, econômicas e sociais? 4) Por que indivíduos se engajam em processos associativos e em ações de contestação e quais as decorrências disso para suas vidas?

These questions are an outcome of the maturation of the collective action study field during the last decades. Particularly important in this process are the studies on social and political contention, which enabled researchers to connect different empirical objects and theoretical frameworks such as: research on associations and civil society; social movements and political contention theories; and studies on engagement and militancy.

Aside from these general influences, in Brazil, the collective action study field is also affected by the literature on social movements produced during the decades of 1970 and 1980. These research focused on the emergency of urban, rural and new social movements in Brazil, investigating their construction as political subjects, their autonomy, identity and representation. Several analyses considered these social movements as new political actors, organized outside the boundaries of the production structures and distant from traditional political participation spaces. Generally, in these studies, social movements were comprehended as the agents of Brazilian democratization during an authoritarian and repressive historical period.

During the decade of 1990, “civil society” became the most used concept in social movement and association studies. This concept became popular in social sciences, being used to gather distinct organizational models present in society, such as the ones which have a contentious feature in interactions with the state, as well as the ones which have a cooperative feature. Anyway, “civil society” was related to the amount of social actors that would be responsible for Brazilian democratization.

Nevertheless, in the late 1990’s and in the beginning of the decade of 2000, it is possible to observe a growing critical movement towards the analytical weaknesses of the “civil society” model. Among these critics, it is possible to stress the strong normative feature of the “civil society” concept which hindered possible empirical problematizations and the apprehension of the characteristics and dynamics of the processes that were distant to the established normative goals. Also, this perspective is criticized by its lack of theoretical and methodological tools for the analysis of the construction and action of civil society’s actors. Regarding this point, it is possible to observe a strong critic towards the dichotomic and Manichean conception of the relation between civil society and the state, which hindered a satisfactory analysis of the institutional-political constrains of the associative processes.

Following this agenda, GPACE, founded in 2009 through the dialogue with diverse theoretical perspectives on association, contestation and engagement processes, aims to elaborate analytical frameworks adequate to Brazilian reality about social organization and mobilization processes in their relation with the (national and international) institutional political constraints, analyzing also the collective action repertoires, the mobilization structures and the frames which constitute these processes.

The research currently developed by the GPACE members are related to four major themes: engagement processes and militant careers; relations between institutional-political contexts/dynamics and collective action; symbolic, interpretative and cultural dynamics of social mobilization; and the impact of new information and communication technologies on collective action.