Concentration Area

Area of Evaluation: Urban and Regional Planning/Demography

Area of Concentration: Popular Demands and Regional Dynamics

Description:

The program is subdivided into two lines of research aimed at studies on social vulnerability, urban or rural, from an interdisciplinary perspective, which allows a better understanding of regional dynamics and to think about which factors contribute to the maintenance of reality, overcoming or kickback of processes. Vulnerability can be understood as the evidence of threats from different species: social, environmental, emotional, economic, geographic, among others, and the individual internal capacity, of a group or community, to have or to develop tools of overcoming difficulties (Monteiro, 2011); also popular demands as results of vulnerabilities that reach a greater number of people in a wider social context.

The focus of the Master Program, based on the concept of social vulnerability, allows us to envisage a kaleidoscope of information, knowledge and narratives that help us to visualize the structural determinants of this situation, even if the situations are of diverse natures, such as economic, social, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, gender, and can re-think and/or subsidize public policies that take into account the particularities of localities, sociabilities, and subjectivities, as well as what favors the constitution of overcoming difficulties, reducing social inequalities, promoting social mobility and democracy. In addition to this understanding, the Master Program intends to elucidate factors that arise from the dialectics of the social groups themselves and from the researchers, which are characterized as possibilities and tools for overcoming vulnerability, constituting themselves in social technologies.

Also, characterizing popular demands and social vulnerabilities within the regional dynamics of Northern Brazil is a condition for the analysis, understanding and implementing social and educational policies, as well as interventions, in order to revert and/or prevent social obstacles. In this way, the two lines of research agglutinate specific investigative aspects around popular demands and regional dynamics. One of the lines of research puts together common interests that elucidate historical, geographic and educational aspects of groups understood as vulnerable. In the other line, we have natural sciences, psychology and public administration; also focusing on specific groups.

Both of these lines have the assumptions, as well as the visualization, of factors that favor the overcoming of obstacles to avoid vulnerability, the verification of those who collaborate with the organization of groups, the collective actions, the understanding of the physical, social, political and psychological environments with a view to constitute intervention tools, and public policies subsidies in order to collaborate with local and regional development.