1 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIPS, ORGANIC WRITING, AND RE-LOCATIONS: LITERARY EXISTENCES OF WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES
Research Area: Literatures, subjects and social practices
Description: For several decades, various researchers have critically positioned themselves regarding the constitution of the Brazilian literary canon. The names of women writers appear timidly in high school textbooks, only in content related to the 20th century, and a spiral movement connects the absences reproduced by the school to the invisibility endorsed by the curricula of undergraduate degrees in Literature – the initial training space for educators. We rarely find references to Maria Firmina dos Reis, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Cassandra Rios, Gilka Machado, Conceição Evaristo, and other writers as interpreters of Brazil. It is appropriate to refer to a genealogy of erasures that has prohibited the authorial position of women in our and other contexts (see Anzaldúa, 2000; Duarte, 2003; Holanda & Paiva, 2015; Lorde, 2019; Schmidt, 2002). Based on this reflection, this project implies a dual approach: exposing the incomplete nature of the canon and erasing the limits imposed on such subjectivities. We will focus on the gaps that have historically restricted the inclusion of women writers in the publishing context (see Holanda & Paiva, 2015) and also prevented readers from accessing their work. We position ourselves beyond the thematic character in order to reach the authorial dimension, which justifies our interest in considering representational acts as poetic-political spaces of dissent and re-existence “(…) in contexts marked by (…) a socially constructed gender asymmetry” (see Butler, 2016, p. 34) and by the logic of compulsory heteronormativity. As Butler discusses, these subjectivities need to be seen as plural existences, hence we will treat them as complex authorships, distancing ourselves from any essentialism or universalizing pretension of the term “woman”. Considering the intersectional perspective, we dialogue with Audre Lorde (2019) and other Black feminists (Kilomba, 2019; hooks, 1995). Lorde challenges us to rethink homoaffectivity between women and its implications in Black lesbian-feminist writings as the “harsh and urgent clarity” (Lorde, 2007, p. 40) encompasses the crucial understanding of the need to wage “(…) a war against the tyrannies of silence (…)” (p. 41). Therefore, it is fundamental to engage with her reflections on the transformation of silence into language and action. The reflective journey expands with the notion of “organic writing” proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa (2000). In her “Letter to Third World Women Writers”, Anzaldúa raises questions about the historical prohibitions that prevent Black and Indigenous women from claiming their place as writers. Anzaldúa argues in favor of the dangerous potential of women’s writing, which lies in the fact that such experience with words can possibly create deep fissures in hegemonic discourses. Literary self-representation is a form of resistance insofar as writing the self should not be conceived through the lens of individuality, but rather as an experience in which multiple selves merge and where the possibility of identification by other women emerges. Understanding that Anzaldúa’s letter still resonates socially, her visceral reflections are embraced here as we consider the literature of contemporary cis and trans women as fictionalized responses to questions posed more than three decades ago. The present project will be developed within the scope of the LEALL Research Group (CNPq/UNEB), which will allow us to strengthen the body of studies currently underway at LEALL and to contribute to the training process of young women researchers in the Cultural Territory of the Recôncavo. In this way, we envision strengthening the field of creative writing by cis and trans women within the Postgraduate Program in Language Technologies (PPGTEL–DCH-UNEB), interweaving artistic, political, and academic dimensions.
Professor: DANIELA GALDINO NASCIMENTO
Start Date: March 1, 2020
2 Cartographies of the Formative Processes of Students in the Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics and Literature/English Language
Research Area: Languages, Contexts, and Literacies
Description: Knowledge production aimed at weaving together experiments and understandings about the formative processes of undergraduate students in the English language teaching degree program and their respective literatures. To this end, it considers writing as a mode of existence and epistemic and scientific resistance, valuing student protagonism in formative processes and understanding it as an implied mode of creating knowledge produced at the nexus between teaching and research. Thus, training is understood in all its complexity, that is, not only in theoretical horizons, but mainly in the embodied life of social and pedagogical practices, in epistemologies and politics of the self. With this, the connections between personal and historical memory, auto-ethnographic accounts, and the clues of the cartographic method are explored, whether by mapping experiential knowledge or by inhabiting formative territories such as supervised curricular internships. More objectively, the aim is to encourage students to research their own education in a polylogical, reflective, and critical way through embodied writing as a proper and appropriate mode of knowledge creation. The methodological model is based on experimentation whose bricolage is inspired by cartography, participant observation, ethnographic field diaries, and the perspective of Embodied Research.
Professor: CLEBEMILTON GOMES DO NASCIMENTO
Start Date: March 1, 2021
3 Black Intellectuals: Biographies and Poetics
Research Area: Literatures, subjects and social practices
Description: The research project entitled “A Contemporary Reading of Black Representations in Texts of Brazilian Literary Historiography” seeks to study the different representations of Black people and Afro-descendants in literary texts from the 19th and/or 20th/21st centuries, in contrast to Afro-Brazilian literary production, with the aim of raising discussions about how some discourses produced operate racist and discriminatory processes in contexts that directly affect the development of Black populations in the country. It is equally important to analyze the criteria used in literary texts by Afro-Brazilian writers to reverse the system and traditional relations of representation in which the category “Black” is built on derogatory stereotypes. Therefore, it is assumed that themes, languages, formal or stylistic innovations, critical interventions in intellectual work, ruptures with the canon, discursive resignifications, and other aspects can create a movement of cultural exchange, based on the critical proposition of reading Brazilian literature in dialogue with Afro-Brazilian literature. The research project entitled “Black Intellectuals: Biographies and Poetics,” developed in conjunction with the first, is a biographical and poetic study on the specific literary production of Black women writers in the 19th and 21st centuries. It involves the selection of Black women writers from Afro-Brazilian literature, with the main purpose of presenting these authors from three distinct moments in which they contributed to the formation of Afro-Brazilian literature: as precursors, in consolidation, and in contemporary times. The introductory texts of the writers will be produced by graduate students of the Professional Master’s Degree Program in Language and Literature – PROFLETRAS (both current and former students) and by students (both current and former) of the Undergraduate Portuguese Language and Literature program at the State University of Bahia – UNEB, Campus V. In addition to investing in the biographical and poetic writing of UNEB students for the production of the texts, the material will be illustrated and organized so that the literary work of these authors gains visibility, especially in the educational training segment of basic education. The two research projects are interconnected, focusing on racial and gender divides, and are fully supported by Law No. 10.639/2003, for the study of Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture. It is important to remember that this law amended Law No. 9.394/1996 and was updated by Law No. 11.645/2008, which also includes the approach to Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Culture within the educational context. The methodology applied to both projects is centered on the proposition of transdisciplinary theoretical operators for bibliographic research and the relationship that the research data establishes with other avenues for disseminating literature in the digital environment, such as blogs, informative websites, and applications, which serve as relevant spaces for the circulation of ideas and the production of scientific and technological material. The projects provide students with the opportunity to disseminate critical studies on the contribution of Afro-Brazilian literature, especially regarding Black and female production, in scientific events and for publication in academic journals and other technologically adapted channels, through the work carried out by the Literature and Afro-descendence research group (LAD). It is fundamental that the body of writers, especially female writers and their respective literary productions, be included in the educational training of future teachers and students, creating a literary collection whose bibliographic/digital characteristics are more representative of the exemplary relevance of Afro-Brazilian texts for the exercise of critical knowledge in the Humanities.
Professor: ROSEMERE FERREIRA DA SILVA
Start Date: April 24, 2013
4 THRESHOLDS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION PROSE: MIGRATIONS, JOURNEYS, DISPLACEMENTS
Research Area: Literatures, subjects and social practices
Description: Assuming the impossibility of language to create totalizing universes in the image of any model, contemporary literature creates undisciplined objects, better understood through a constellational epistemology (Eagleton, 1993) aimed at anticipating, on the threshold of shapeless frames, its own (pre)frontiers of action. Inserted in the present that makes the poetics of diversity, of relation and coinciding with the “right to opacity,” in which discursive places are questioned and question the spectacle of hegemonies, as Edouard Glissant (2005) tells us, literature affirms its unquestionable insertion in the cultural, social, political and existential demands of the present. Not infrequently, the opacity to which we claim a right rests in the interstices of languages, so that the many fictions (and metafictions), not only literary ones, give themselves to the revision of meanings crystallized under the sign of the one. As Vaihinger (2011, p. 99) tells us, recognizing the “need to employ conscious fictions as an indispensable basis for our scientific research, our aesthetic delight, and our practical actions,” it remains to engage in reflections that help us overcome blind spots, embracing the eternal return of difference, of becoming, and avoiding a tautological reduction of thought. Studying contemporary works, then, offers access to fictions that confront us with the multiple realities discussed in the contested contemporary territory of literature (Dalcastagne, 2012), through knowledge essential to the literary researcher, both regarding the act of narrating and its reader demands, and regarding knowledge related to the most cherished demands of contemporary being. From this perspective, the present research project aims to study contemporary literature, with a view to discussing internal elements of its linguistic, formal, and aesthetic constitution, analyzing themes, characters, spaces, points of view, (inter)cultural transits, as well as problematizing the current dialogue between literature and other fields of knowledge. The intention is to conduct studies on migrations, journeys, and displacements, based on critical analytical frameworks, including reflections on reader formation and its current demands, understanding that the contemporary is a fragmented, hybrid, untimely, and ever-changing time (Agamben, 2013). The first critical framework, entitled “Women’s Journeys,” is dedicated to the study of female characters in novels also authored by women. The methodology has a qualitative approach and is carried out through bibliographic research, encompassing: bibliographic survey; selection of themes and literary works to be read in each stage; bi-weekly meetings (or to be arranged) with the Research Group for readings, analyses, and follow-up; Presentation of individual analyses and/or group discussions about the works; development of sub-projects for Scientific Initiation; organization and participation in events; preparation of articles for publication. This project is expected to yield a fruitful output from the researchers involved, strengthening, among students of Campus V, the study and dissemination of research on contemporary literary works, considering that literature establishes the diverse, the oblique, the unstable, both within and outside of narrative composition, through the reader’s agency.
Professor: ILMARA VALOIS BACELAR FIGUEIREDO COUTINHO
Start Date: March 1, 2019
5 Text, Discourse and Teaching
Research Area: Languages, Contexts, and Literacies
Description: The Research and Studies Group of the Text, Discourse and Teaching Center – hereinafter abbreviated by its initials in Portuguese, and for dissemination purposes, as GENTE – is organized as a Research Group, an integral part of the Research and Extension Centers of the Department of Human Sciences of Campus V and the Department of Education of Campus X of the State University of Bahia. As such, it aims to implement actions aimed at training researchers, producing and disseminating knowledge through scientific initiation, by supervising undergraduate, specialization, master’s and/or doctoral theses, and by conducting scientific research in the areas of Linguistics and Literature and Human and Social Sciences that have as their research objects linguistic and/or sociocultural phenomena embedded in the themes of text and/or discourse, materialized in discursive genres, and the teaching of Portuguese and English. The Group bases its work on the theoretical foundations of Discourse Analysis, Textual Linguistics, Theoretical Studies of the Bakhtin Circle, Applied Linguistics to the Teaching of Portuguese/English, and/or any other theoretical foundations relevant to the analysis and discussion of discourse, text, and the teaching of Portuguese/English, in order to achieve its objectives. As a result of its investigations, GENTE also aims to offer basic education teachers theoretical and methodological support for working with discursive genres and understanding the discursive practices that have justified the organization of linguistic elements, structures, and modes of operation of the respective genres. In this way, the results of the work outlined by the Group can serve as resources and references for teachers in service and for teacher training in these areas of interest. The research carried out by the GENTE Group must fall within one of the three research lines outlined here, or within the articulation of these lines: I – Description and analysis of discursive genres from different spheres of production and circulation; II – Discursive practices, linguistic-textual regularities and modes of operation of discursive genres as pedagogical objects; III – Genres and discursive practices, of origin, circulation and/or operation in contemporary media.
Professor: Adelino Pereira dos Santos
Start Date: March 1, 2020
6 Linguistic Variation, Grammar Teaching, and the Development of Teaching Proposals
Research Area: Languages, Contexts, and Literacies
Description: This project focuses on the uses of language from a socio-historical and socio-communicative perspective and aims to study linguistic variations in Brazilian Portuguese as evidenced in texts written by students in basic and higher education, in order to foster reflections and didactic proposals to guide the teaching of grammar and linguistic variation in schools. To this end, a collection of school texts representative of the uses of the formal written modality of the Portuguese language will be organized. From this collection, it will be possible to map the processes of linguistic variation and change, correlating them with factors inherent to their internal structure, socio-historical processes of Brazilian Portuguese, and characteristics of the subjects involved, such as position in the community, reading and writing experiences, exposure to social media, gender, age group, etc., in addition to issues related to the discursive situation. By comparing the linguistic uses of subjects from different educational levels, it will be possible to diagnose the extent to which the school has been acting in the recovery of the standard forms of the language. This research also aims to describe the approach given to grammatical phenomena in teaching manuals, traditional grammar books, and Portuguese language classes, and to point out proposals to guide the teacher, theoretically and methodologically, along the paths of a teaching practice that moves away from the misconception that teaching grammar is teaching standard norms and their metalanguage, and that starts from the student’s epilinguistic knowledge as well as the plurality of norms at the service of different communicative activities. Aligning with the current context, it also proposes as an objective to develop methodological strategies and teaching materials for the teaching of morphosyntax of the Portuguese language with technological support. In order to achieve the intended objective, the following methodological path is established: a. reading and systematization of theoretical references on variationist sociolinguistics, educational sociolinguistics, Portuguese language teaching, the historical constitution of Brazilian Portuguese, and the linguistic aspects that characterize it; b. Diagnosis of the reality of Portuguese language teaching in basic education based on direct classroom observations, analysis of teaching materials, and interviews with teachers, in order to identify the treatment given to the grammatical component and linguistic variation; c. Development of a corpus – collection, digitization, and transcription of texts written by students in basic and higher education; d. Conducting studies on aspects of variation evidenced in students’ writing; e. Development of pedagogical proposals and teaching materials to support the teaching of Portuguese with the application of technologies; f. Conducting workshops in public schools for the application and evaluation of methodological proposals and teaching materials; g. Conducting workshops and/or mini-courses aimed at Literature students and Portuguese Language teachers, with an emphasis on reflections and analyses of aspects of the standard and popular norms of Brazilian Portuguese, as well as methodologies for addressing such phenomena in the classroom. This research will have a significant impact, as it will promote investigations that support the creation of strategies and materials for teaching and learning Portuguese, fostering a closer relationship between scientific knowledge and classroom practice. Furthermore, its reach in initial and continuing teacher training is noteworthy, since both students of Portuguese Language and Literature courses and teachers in the basic education system will have access to the reflections and materials produced through participation in workshops, mini-courses, and other events, with an emphasis on reflections and analyses of aspects of the standard and popular norms of Brazilian Portuguese, as well as methodologies for addressing these phenomena in the classroom.
Professor: GILCE DE SOUZA ALMEIDA Start Date: September 1, 2020
7 WORKING TOGETHER: READING IN ENGLISH IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Research Area: Languages, Contexts, and Literacies
Description: This project seeks to investigate ways to expand the training of English language teachers in the municipality of Santo Antônio de Jesus (and possibly beyond), and as a result, improve the quality of English language teaching and learning in the region. In addition to encouraging the study of teaching methodologies to improve the teaching and learning of the four skills, and other aspects of training such as planning and assessment methods, etc., we aim to broaden the perspectives of future teachers to consider identity issues and promote their ability to raise socio-politically relevant discussions in the classroom. We base our efforts on an approach based on Critical, Intercultural, and Communicative Teaching, which is committed to promoting training that encourages interaction and respect for a broad and diverse spectrum of peoples and cultures inside and outside the classroom, not only appreciating the culture of peoples with high social prestige. The project is rooted in the research, outreach, and teaching activities of the two coordinating professors. Since 2007, Dr. Sally Inkpin, a professor in the areas of English Language, Supervised Curricular Internship, and Literature, has coordinated the extension project ‘Working Together: Reading in English in Public Schools’. This extension project produces reading materials with tasks, answers, and suggestions for use, aimed at colleges and schools in the municipality of Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Brazil. The different genres of the materials explore the old cross-curricular themes established by the National Curriculum Parameters – PCN – (MEC/SEF, 1998): ethics, health, the environment, sexual orientation, cultural plurality, work and consumption, as well as other topics of interest to the local community, aiming for its readers not only to be informed about the topics covered, but also to begin to reflect on and critically engage with them. The project engages in various networks of interaction and support, including university professors, the extension project team, university interns, the supervising high school and elementary school teachers who assist these interns, their students, and the users of the blog materials made available by the project. In addition to these activities, the professor organizes other extension courses such as the Basic English Course and English for Specific Purposes, and worked for five years in the Institutional Scholarship Program for Teaching Initiation with the project: “Weaving readings, (re)constructing identities: the place of differences in the English language classroom”. Professor Alyxandra Gomes Nunes organized an extension course entitled Literary Readings, and through debates raised at the meeting, an interest in the research area of Racial Literacy emerged, based on the theoretical framework of Aparecida de Jesus Ferreira and Nilma Lino Gonçalves. Recently, the professor began an extension project on the interconnections between Critical Racial Literacy and the use and development of Afrocentric English as a tool to combat racism and develop racial awareness among English language undergraduates. The two professors, members of the English Language, Literature and Translation Studies Group, decided to join forces, forming a joint project with the aim of offering training and research opportunities from a critical, intercultural and communicative perspective that values Afrocentricity. This approach is well received by UNEB’s public, which is mostly Black. Throughout our long journey, we have discovered that the process of teaching and learning the English language is facilitated if factors of identity construction are taken into account.
Professor(a): Alyxandra Gomes Nunes
Start Date: March 1, 2022
8 SOCIAL NETWORKS AND CARTOGRAPHIES OF “TEACHING”: LITERACIES AND WRITING AND READING PRACTICES IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS
Research Area: Languages, Contexts, and Literacies
Description: This research will broadly discuss the theoretical processes involved in using smartphones and digital mobile devices as pedagogical tools, and social networks in the teaching of digital text genres and languages. To this end, it references actions carried out by the Study Group on Education, Languages and Digital Media – GEELMAD, focusing on social networks and their teaching cartographies (Anastasiou, 1998) of languages online. We understand that social networks, through pages pedagogically directed towards language content, constitute a teaching network; this is a teaching action that aims at student learning, going beyond the simple reproduction of content by the teacher; because, as is known, in the traditional classroom, interaction with knowledge and linguistic culture under study is limited to a simple exposition of topics, and nothing can be said about the student’s apprehension of the content. In this overcoming of traditional exposition as the sole way to explain content, the teaching strategies highlighted here are inserted, through social media pages. Our objective here is to problematize the traditional methodologies used in language classrooms that disregard digital technologies as auxiliary tools for the process of reflective and practical teaching and learning of foreign languages. To this end, we discuss some social media pages, thus configuring a case study, anchored in virtual ethnography, through which we can follow the network interactions, in which users constituted themselves as the nodes of the teaching cartography on the web. A priori, we infer that the cartography of the web guarantees interaction and production of linguistic knowledge of the language in collaborative learning. Thus, we distributed the general objective into three specific actions: to research, on the Facebook social network, profiles developed for language teaching; to map the main pages and/or groups for language teaching on Facebook; To produce a didactic sequence for the use of Facebook pages and/or groups as a space for language teaching; and to develop teaching methodologies based on the use of Facebook as a pedagogical space. Mobile technology is in continuous evolution, and the diversity of resources available to users has guaranteed the accomplishment of multiple tasks, one of which is mobile connectivity, leading to relevance in the network which, by its nature, is a space for interaction and collaborative communication. We know that through mobile technologies, the capacity to learn, teach, and create collective content is indescribable at a numerical level, since research indicates the existence of billions of active mobile phones worldwide. In this scenario, we highlight the importance of considering teaching cartographies as a methodology, as social networks have allowed, through mobilities and spatio-temporal displacements within and outside the network. Obviously, mobile technologies add to the teacher’s pedagogical projects to the extent that the professional adheres to the teachings affirmed by them.
Professor: ROBERIO PEREIRA BARRETO
Start Date: March 1, 2021
English version by Paterson Franco Costa