Struggle and Expansion: Mães de Maio Movement in the state of São Paulo

• Grant number: 21/05179-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques
• Grantee: Matheus de Araújo Almeida
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/07886-8 - Arts and semantics of creation and memory, AP.TEM

Abstract

The research proposed in this project consists of an ethnography of Mães de Maio's Movement in its original nucleus, in Baixada Santista, São Paulo's coast, and in its expanded nuclei in Mogi das Cruzes, Osasco and the East Side of the city of São Paulo. In this course, through observant participation, I will follow the Mothers of May from these different nuclei in their relational networks, activities, meetings, articulations, mobilizations and confrontations with actors allied or antagonistic to these mothers, seeking to identify, describe and analyze the particularities and the effects of the ongoing expansion of the Mães de Maio's Movement in the state of São Paulo. As this is a movement of bereaved mothers, I will examine the use of the native categories of mourning and struggle, in dialogue with a pertinent anthropological literature regarding issues that underlie the movement - such as kinship, politics, memory, death, and territory - in the process of generation and expansion of new Mães de Maio and subsequent new nuclei. By analyzing these forms of generation and expansion of mothers and nuclei, this research among, with, and about Mães de Maio's Movement will seek to understand how mourning traces alliances and builds socialities by becoming the emerging point of a struggle. In this sense, this project intends to contribute to the anthropological debate (especially to the anthropology of politics) and to the development of the analysis of academic engagement with social movements contemporarily.