Psychosocial and historical approaches to societies in crisis situations

• Grant number: 24/02947-0
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: August 15, 2024
• End date: September 06, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Neri de Barros Almeida
• Grantee: Neri de Barros Almeida
• Visiting researcher: Julian Yves Manley
• Visiting researcher institution: University Of Central Lancashire/Uclan, England
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/02912-3 - A connected history of the Middle Ages: communication and circulation from the Mediterranean Sea, AP.TEM

Abstract

The project "Psychosocial and historical approaches to societies in crisis situations" aims, through a theoretical and multidisciplinary approach, to generate and improve tools for defining and analyzing crisis situations in past societies. The fundamental objective is to improve historians' understanding of social reactions to crisis situations. Considering that social reactions to crises mobilize patterns of memory and forgetting that integrate social memory and subjective memory, and that these patterns are not always clear to historians, discussions will be conducted around the interaction between History and Social Psychology.Theoretical discussions will be carried out based on the analysis of data from social crises resulting from "environmental disasters". In fact, due to its unprecedented nature, climate change constitutes a watershed in the social history of "environmental disasters". However, past experiences affect how we react to them today. Social Psychology applied to the current climate crisis can highlight memory data that shape behaviors, values and emotions, promoting the establishment, expansion and criticism of research criteria dedicated to the social history of past "environmental crises". These traits, in fact, despite their relevance may have gone unnoticed by historians in their reconstitution of ancient societies. Cooperation with Psychosociology thus supports both knowledge of the remote past and the development of an original and socially relevant route of historical reconstitution that unites the past and the present and also the future.The dialogue between History and Psychology is not new. However, the development of psychosocial studies has expanded the bases of this dialogue significantly. Dr Julian Y. Manley is a psychosocial researcher working as Professor of Social Innovation at the University of Central Lancashire (https://www.uclan.ac.uk/) and as Director of the Climate Psychology Alliance (https://www.climatepsychologyalliance .org/). His studies on crisis are oriented in two complementary directions. Firstly, the study of the continued and successful confrontation of the city of Preston in the United Kingdom with the serious economic crisis that began in the 1980s. Secondly, the investigation of the psychosocial conditions involved in the social reaction to climate change.Although focused on the debate between History and Social Psychology, the project contributes to studies in other areas that focus on crisis situations or are impacted by them and that make use of concepts such as crisis, environmental crisis, environmental disaster, climate change, memory , representation, resilience, vulnerability, cooperation, ecological paradigm, development and growth. In this way, projects and researchers from the areas of sociology, urbanism and geology are associated with this proposal, who share these same interests, difficulties and conceptual fields, whose cooperation will make the proposed work season richer and deeper. Finally, it is important to highlight the importance that studies on crises and responses to crises have acquired in recent years, in different areas of knowledge. This issue, in fact, was the subject of a doctoral school and a collective publication in which several of the proponents of this activity plan participated. (AU)