Repairing sociality, safeguarding democracy

• Grant number: 24/19299-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Paula Montero
• Grantee: Morgane Laure Reina
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 23/15193-0 - Repairing sociality, safeguarding democracy: Transatlantic North-South narratives and practices of deep equality, AP.R

Abstract

Valuable research has been undertaken on current social polarization, weaponization of difference anddemocratic backsliding. Less common are investigations into everyday navigation and negotiation ofdiversity in creating conditions for mutual understanding and social recognition. Our proposedproject, "Repairing sociality, safeguarding democracy: Transatlantic North-South narratives andpractices of deep equality" (RSSD), seeks to address this gap. RSSD is an interdisciplinary North-South comparative research project that, drawing on Lori Beaman's concept of deep equality, focuseson daily practices, or "non-events," through which people move beyond politics and the law to defynotions of "diversity as a problem" and find ways of "living together well" through, among others,recognition of similarity and making of community. Teams in South Africa, Brazil, Canada, and theUnited Kingdom will develop local case studies and collaborate in cross-country comparativeanalyses to understand how local practices of deep equality may provide new frameworks forstrengthening democracy, ensuring inclusive governance, and improving trust. The project will craft aconceptual framework incorporative of both South and North epistemologies to enable mutuallearnings about alternative practices that repair sociality towards greater trust and inclusion, despite the erosion of confidence in political representation and the legal system of producing justice.Homing in on the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationality and other differences, cooperation andexchange practices will be mapped and compared. Uniquely, the investigation extends to digitalpractices to understand how digital and social media play a role in practices of deep equalityparticularly by exploring agency, community and sociality in online discourses related to each local context and through a separate case study which focuses specifically on social media activism in theUK. The interface between deep equality and bottom-up practices of democracy, we hypothesize, will provide novel pathways of approach to the contemporary (and future) challenges associated with democracy, governance, and trust.