Presentation

The Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Latin American Studies (PPG-IELA) is an innovative interdisciplinary proposal which, based on transnational research, aims at the development of critical knowledges concerning both its basis – considering its diverse permanent research staff – and its process of circulation of knowledge – resulting from the natural movement that is typical in the bordering region where UNILA is located. It is also important to highlight the presence of students and professors from several countries of Latin America in UNILA.

In order to be implemented in UNILA’s strategy, PPG-IELA presupposes in its fundamentals a problematization of the limits of the notion of “national”, due to the concept of transnational “cultural districts”, or even in benefit of the analysis of political, economic or cultural similarities and differences which are characteristic of the various Latin American regions. These acknowledgements value the circulation of knowledges in territories that are defined by biomes, and which have specificities that are central to our researches.
PPG-IELA has an interdisciplinary perspective with multiple instruments for analysis, and it operates with categories of observation of the lives of several groups and communities, as well as of innovative themes, with the aim of producing critical thinking regarding social and cultural issues in terms of Latin American time and space.

The dialogue between the areas of Languages, Arts, History, Anthropology and related disciplines has the goal of interpreting the processes of production and circulation of knowledges, in articulation with the practice and social and cultural mobilities in Latin America. PPG-IELA focuses its researches on social, political and cultural issues, with the objective of questioning the categories and fundamentals that have traditionally constituted the fields of knowledge, aiming at comprehending social practice that include the memory networks and their possible processes of transformation, fragmentation and discontinuity.