FACTORY OF IDEAS 2024 - International Symposium and Doctoral School “The Turbulent Nineties, the invention of multiculturalism and intangible culture, and the Reconfiguration of Ethnic and African Studies: Perspectives from the Global South”

Period: September 2-13, 2024
 
Location: Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO), Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (FFCH), Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and Goethe Institute, Salvador.
 
Summary:
The Factory of Ideas (Fábrica de Ideias in Portuguese) is an intensive, international and advanced doctoral school on ethnic-racial and African studies focusing on graduate students that has been promoting annual editions since 1998, always with the concern of theoretically articulating these two fields and providing spaces for dialogue that truly encompass global issues, involving researchers at different stages of their academic career as well as paying attention to the individual research project of the students. In the last edition, held in Maputo in 2022, we associated an international symposium with the doctoral school. It was a way to optimise resources since the theme of both events is the same and most scholars invited to the symposium also lectured in the doctoral school. The 2024 edition of the Factory of Ideas is dedicated to the theme “The Turbulent Nineties and the Reconfiguration of Ethnic and African Studies: perspectives from the Global South” and will coincide with the celebration of the 65th anniversary of the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO). In the same direction as our last edition in Maputo, the 2024 edition of the Factory of Ideas will consist of two parts: the first four days will be more theoretical, in the format of an international symposium, and the following six days will be more practical and focused, in the format of a seminar, on debating the research projects of the students. The 1990s saw transformations in the global intellectual landscape, with a significant impact on African, Ethnic and Afro- American Studies. Several processes converged for the reconfiguration of these fields of
study: the height of multiculturalism and the beginning of its crisis; the advent of intangible heritage as a variable in an increasingly broader set of symbolic disputes and social conflicts; the globalization of the “post-colonial”; the beginning of the “turn decolonial”. The “Global South” also experienced political and economic transitions that changed the context and conditions of knowledge production, with the emergence of voices and agendas hitherto silenced, in a complex situation of weakening of the State and reinforcement of external dependence. We propose to discuss the facets of this process of theoretical reconfiguration and its intertwining with the Global South. In this edition various forms of participation are foreseen: a. in-person participants of both moments of the event (around 50 senior researchers and 50 graduate students and early career junior academics). B. up to 10 researchers of intangible heritage and cultural activists or practitioners participating in the special session of the symposium dedicated to heritage and C. the public that will attend the symposium and the doctoral school through live online transmission, anywhere on the planet.
 
Goals:
Our main objective is to provide an advanced reflection on the fields of African Studies and Ethnic Studies, with particular attention to their interrelationship and
reconfiguration from the last decade of the 20th century, bringing together a set of leading researchers, mostly from the Global South (based in Brazil and other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe). The first part of our Doctoral School will consist of a set of ten round tables animated by senior researchers while the second part consists of a set of workshops in which senior scholars discuss research projects with young researchers, including university lecturers at the beginning of their careers, post-doctoral students and graduate students, also from different parts of the Global South. Our aim is to strengthen and diversify our international intellectual dialogue network beyond the traditional circuits that connect us to academic centres in the North. The specific objective of this school is to promote a forum for the exchange of ideas, research objects, techniques, concepts, approaches and epistemological concerns among researchers at different career stages, in different academic disciplines and from different geographic, social and cultural contexts, to enhance the future advancement of knowledge in these two fields. As a way to optimize human and financial resources, some of the senior researchers involved in the first part will participate also in the second part of the doctoral school lecturing and directing activities. The Factory of Ideas is a pioneering initiative within Brazilian universities, whose objective is to encourage both the exchange of researchers at various career stages interested in the theme of ethnic-racial studies and in the interface with African studies, as it favours the incorporation of a comparative and international dimension. The Factory of Ideas is part of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Ethnic and African
Studies (Posafro), located at the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO) at UFBA, which constitutes an important facility for training a new generation of specialists in ethnic and African studies. Throughout its last editions, Fábrica de Ideias operated also as an inducer for the consolidation of research networks that link Posafro to other graduate programs in different areas of the Humanities in Bahia (graduate programs in History, Social Sciences and Anthropology at UFBA, UFRB and UNILAB), in other Brazilian states (UFMA, UFPE, UNICAMP) and in other countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
 
Scientific relevance:
 
Since its beginnings, the formation of African, Ethnic and Afro-American Studies has been directly linked to the international transit of ideas as well as to the unequal
relations of knowledge production, as is evident in the process of founding the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences at UFBA in 1942 and the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies at the same institution in 1959 (See Sansone 2022). Created in 1998 and held annually, the Fábrica de Ideias advanced doctoral school has always favoured a South- South perspective, as well as questioning the naturalness of terms such as African, Ethnic or Afro-American studies, and their relative autonomy - as if they were separate fields, or even, in some cases, antagonistic. We believe, on the contrary, that these are three fields of study in which the history, categories, biographies and researchers´ agendas have been much more entangled than is commonly thought. In view of this, our proposal will address how the discussion around these entangled fields developed in different political and intellectual geographies in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. Our aim is to critically (re)think intellectual genealogies from different regions of the Global South. In order to solve the problems proposed here, the Factory of Ideas 2024 will focus on scrutinizing the 1990s, a period that promised radical changes in our fields, but which was also the decade during which talk of globalization began with greater force. This period also saw the outbreak of severe economic crises that affected both Africa and Latin America, in a combination that effectively weakened the national
state, while at the same time the emergence of agendas from countless social groups that had hitherto been repressed or kept invisible, started strengthening calls and movements for democratization within each country and in transnational networks, which meant redefining foundational notions such as democracy, citizenship, liberation and heritage. Since 1990, the Third World has increasingly manifested itself as an actor, and no longer just as an object of social research and theoretical debate. There has also been the growth of critical voices, such as the Subaltern Studies Group led by Ranaj Guha and the Modernity led by Ranajit Guha and the Modernity/Coloniality group, which emerged before 1990, although their global dissemination continued to depend on validation from consolidated academic centres in the North. It is no coincidence that this "post-colonial" theoretical geography became the object of investigation and theorisation by intellectuals from the South. In addition, there was an expansion in the production and translation of works of African, Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Indigenous intellectuals in Latin America, as well as what can be characterised as an "ethnic renaissance" among people of African and indigenous descent in Latin America. Around 1990, we also saw the impact of multiculturalism, often associated with affirmative action measures, as a method of dealing with cultural
and ethnic diversity in countries with large populations of African and indigenous descent in the New World, and with countries that are ethnically and culturally diverse
in Africa. The World Conference on Racial Discrimination in Durban in 2001 is an example of the 1990s reverberating in successive years. This meant a fairly radical change in terms of academic culture, which generated a new set of "culture wars", accompanied by calls for public attention to intangible heritage, which went hand in hand with criticism of the dominance of material heritage in preservation policies,especially with regard to historically subaltern or historically subaltern or discriminated against groups. Multiculturalism and the conception of nations as plural, affirmative action policies and the politicisation of racial and ethnic and ethnic identities, the processes of cultural patrimonialisation, criticism of the permanence of Western cultural and academic domination entrenched in the geopolitics of knowledge, have together transformed the conditions for the formation of social identities and the relationship between the subjects and objects of research, and the political intertwining of academic production in the fields of African Studies, Afro-American Studies and the relation between indigenous and non-indigenous people, especially to the extent that these studies mobilise collective identities and memory. It is crucial to examine the challenges this relatively new focus on (intangible) heritage and memory has posed for African, African-American and indigenous studies. Intangible heritage and memory formation will be discussed in their diversity and complexity (music, oral literature, dance, etc.).
 
Information about the scientific and/or technological society or association that will
promote the event:
The Factory of Ideas was established in 1998 at the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies at
Cândido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro. The doctoral school was transferred to
the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia in 2002. The
format is that of a doctoral school: around 50 graduate students, recent doctors and post-
doctoral students attend classes and conferences in the morning, carry out seminars and
debates around a theme that varies every year, but always intend to propose new
developments for the social and human sciences. In the afternoon, the students, gather
in small groups coordinated by one or two teachers and debate their own projects and
research. These discussion groups, which strengthen intellectual networks and constitute
true moments of collective guidance, are organized into subthemes and receive lots of
attention from the students. The success of Fábrica de Ideias is due, to a large extent, to
a well-balanced mix of intensive training at the graduate level with workshops in which
each participant's research project is discussed collectively. The call for the course is
distributed in advance and candidates register on our website. They are then selected by
a committee that takes into account their CV, research project (that is related to the
theme proposed by the advanced doctoral school), letter of intentions and cover letters
written by researchers who know the candidates. An organizing and selection committee
strives to ensure that among those selected there are always present students from
outside Brazil, especially from Africa and other Latin American countries, and from
several regions of Brazil, in addition to women (who are always the majority), black
people and students from the needier regions and social strata. Our objective has always
been to combine academic excellence with social inclusion. We have achieved this, as
our international reputation very well attests. Whenever possible, Fábrica de Ideias
carried out extra-mural activities, both in communities, such as in high schools and
quilombo (maroon) communities. A small number of senior undergraduate students are
also admitted to the school. For an overview of our 23 editions see our website
When we started our project in 1998, we had a double objective. On the one hand, we
wanted to contribute to the development of research, documentation and training on
topics associated with the African Diaspora and interethnic relations in general. On the
other hand, we aimed at creating conditions for junior researchers at the graduate level –
including a growing number of black people – especially from regions of Brazil outside
the main centres of academic production, to engage in discussions and networks with
students and researchers in the field of ethnic and racial studies from other regions of
Brazil and others countries, especially from the Southern Hemisphere - countries that
today are defined in English as Global South. Our general objectives have been the
following: a) The creation of better conditions for both the institutionalization and
strengthening at the graduate level of ethnic and racial studies (the Brazilian equivalent
for Ethnic Studies and African-American Studies in the United States) as well as for the
development of African Studies in Brazil. In this sense, from 2002 onwards, when the
course moved from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador to settle at the Centre of Afro-Oriental
Studies (CEAO) of UFBA, the resources for this project had to be available also to
improve CEAO's facilities. We hoped that, within a short period of time, this centre
would qualify for federal funding (scholarships for graduate students, resources for the
library, South-South exchanges, travel funds, organization of seminars and colloquia).
The actual leap in quality occurred when, in 2005, at UFBA we created the
Interdisciplinary Program of Ethnic and African Studies (Posafro), located at CEAO
itself. b) Contribute to the internationalization of research in Brazil by offering students
from Brazil and a select number of other countries the opportunity to be in contact with
cutting-edge academics from Brazil and abroad and learn from them during the doctoral
school. In Brazil and Latin America, these contact opportunities are very limited,
particularly in small state capitals and inland states. Hence, students from Brazil and the
rest of Latin America who are interested in these topics have been seeking our doctoral
school while complaining, most of the time, because of the lack of guidance in their
research projects in ethnic and African studies – which means they cannot write theses
on these topics as there are very few experts on these topics in their universities. In fact,
Fábrica de Ideias partly provides this specific guidance. In African countries, from
which we have received students so far, opportunities to develop a comparative
perspective on ethnic and racial relations and their tensions tend to be even more
reduced. c) Encourage comparative perspectives in the field of ethnic and racial studies
and comparative research projects, especially on the South-South axis. This means
developing a new framework for South-South exchanges, as well as equal conditions for
academic exchanges between Brazilian specialists and institutions from the North
(North America and Western Europe). Special attention should be paid to improving
contacts between researchers from different institutes in Latin America, Africa and the
Caribbean. In the same way, we insist on improving the quality of exchanges with
researchers and research centres in African-American and Ethnic Studies in the United
States and Europe. Improving connections with experts and institutes in the South is
crucial since both our epistemology and our teaching are often based on continuous
comparisons and often complicated or even painful journeys between Brazil and the
North. We agree that critical attention to US-based Black Studies is important because
of the rich tradition of these studies (which is not often presented abroad in all its
complexity). On the other hand, excessive emphasis in the comparative exercise
towards African-American studies in the United States has limited a broader
international comparison, which operates internationally without losing sight of national
contexts. It is our firm opinion that an exchange between these diverse lines of South-
South research networks and the tradition of Ethnic and Afro-American Studies in the
United States can be of mutual benefit – especially when it develops in a new location,
with an environment of international and comparative relations. In recent years, our
international network has developed into a network that connects ethnic studies with
African studies in a movement that both identifies the specificity of each field and
creates shared points of reflection together.
The format of the doctoral school has changed over time, but remains intensive in
character. We went from a school lasting three to four weeks, during the first five
editions, to a more compact nine-working day format, which corresponds to 60 class
hours – equivalent to a graduate discipline. The school is divided into six modules
coordinated by senior foreign researchers or Brazilians. Literature is sent to students in
advance, to be read before the beginning of the course. During the 23 editions of the
course, more than 1000 students participated. In 2003, we launched an international
selection notice for participation in the Fábrica de Ideias course. During recent years
approximately 1/4 of students came from outside Brazil. We have had students from
Cuba, Mozambique, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, United States, Italy,
Costa Rica, South Africa, China, Japan, South Korea, Portugal, Benin, Trinidad, Cape
Verde, Guinea Bissau, Bolivia, Argentina, Nigeria, Senegal, Angola, São Tomé, Benin,
Kenya and Colombia. In the selection process, an effort is made to guarantee the
presence of students from all over Brazil, especially from the North, West and
Northeast, as well as students from different disciplines (anthropology, sociology,
cultural studies, literature, economics, history, law, social psychology, medicine and
arts). Another effort is also made to have both master's and doctoral students, recent
doctors and postdocs. Students who participated in the course with a high success rate
receive certificates, which means points on their academic CVs in their respective
graduate programs. This contributes to the growth of the demand for the course in
subsequent years. The presence of a majority of black students from various countries
has always provided interesting discussions about racial classification and the problems
between insiders and outsiders out in the field. This relative concentration of young and
black intellectuals – who have chosen the academy not only as a possibility of
advancement but also as a way of listening and actively participating in society – has
positively reinforced the self-esteem and confidence of these students. Furthermore, the
Factory Ideas is the first event of this nature, as it brings together a group of young
intellectuals, mostly black, to think and grow together. Most of them maintain contact
after the course, often through chats, websites and emails, or even in research groups
and projects. The interaction between all students, teachers and the coordination team
has been great. The Fábrica de Ideias advanced doctoral school is a moment where you
can exchange ideas in a way not possible in other instances. The change of location
from Rio de Janeiro for Salvador resulted from CEAO's efforts to become an important
centre of research for Ethnic and African Studies in Northeast Brazil. This change also
corresponds to the plan to make Fábrica de Ideias more representative of the Brazilian
reality and to offer more opportunities for graduate students from the North and the
Northeast – the poorest regions and with the highest concentration of Afro-Brazilian
population. Taking place in Salvador offers the course a special touch: an agora within
the polis. For students coming from outside Bahia this is a unique opportunity to get to
know Salvador, a city defined in the past as African or Black Rome of the Americas.
For the majority of students who have traveled little or have never left their cities, this is
a unique opportunity to participate in an international event, as well as listen to and
have contact with different languages. In addition, students come in contact with
excellent academics who are often canonical in the field of Ethnic and African Studies
(among others Paul Gilroy, Lewis Gordon, Achille Mbembe, Michael Hanchard, Carlos
Lopes, Elísio Macamo, Mark Sawyer and Walter Mignolo – the full list of teachers and
modules can be found at our site). These are the authors that our students have
frequently read. To know them personally and have the opportunity to discuss with them
provides the Fábrica de Ideias a special place in academic development in Latin
America.
This urge to internationalize debate and research encourages us to invite every year
foreign lecturers – we also always invite some of the best professors from UFBA and
other Brazilian universities who, on the one hand, benefit from the international
environment and, on the other hand, present the research carried out in Brazil to foreign
colleagues and students. For these reasons, several guest lecturers, who work in the
evaluation of the doctoral school, are excited and want to return to Bahia as visitors to
the course or even to join the graduate Course in Ethnic and Africans. The final
evaluation, which we do with all lecturers, our team, and students, through a
questionnaire as well as individual interviews, proves the success of the course. Each
year the final evaluation has been quite positive. A notable feature of the school is that it
is very well attended and has exceptionally shown no withdrawals. In short, the Fábrica
de Ideias Doctoral School is an internationalization project challenging the three actors
involved - the team, the students and the lecturers – and a success story. However, the
costs of the school are limited when compared to its effects on the Brazilian academic
world, as well as the empowerment and qualification of a new generation of junior
researchers, most of whom are black. Our national and international reputation is
reflected in the increase in registrations.
The Fábrica de Ideias Program has always been militant about affirmative action and
South-South exchanges. We began to develop affirmative actions and South-South
exchanges before these terms began to be used frequently in Brazil. Today, in Brazil,
affirmative action is a consolidated reality and is in the process of expanding in the
academic community - this creates new opportunities, but also new contradictions and
problems to overcome - and South-South exchanges have once again become one of the
priorities of the Brazilian federal government in terms of academic exchanges. Most of
our former students, especially those who participated in the course in their early years,
are now part of the academic world, especially as post-doctors, lecturers and junior
professors. They represent in Brazil and, by extension, in other Latin American and
African countries a select and unique group of intellectuals with a commitment to social
justice and anti-racism and with a strong presence in several international associations
and national academic institutions (Anpocs, Aba, SBPC, ANPUH, ABPN, ABEÁfrica
etc.). It is a big community of ex-fabricantes (manufacturers), as we call our former
students, which we intend to consolidate through improving our website
fabricadeideias.ufba.br, within which we intend to develop a program to monitor
scientific production in real-time as well as the academic, artistic, and civil society
activities of our graduates.
Over these 24 years, Fábrica de Ideias has received support from various sources.
During the first five years, from 1998 to 2002, we received donations from the
MacArthur Foundation and Faperj (Rio de Janeiro State Research Support Foundation).
From 2002 to 2013 we received a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Dutch Sephis
Program for South-South Development. Since 2014 we have received support from
Capes-Paep, Ford F. and the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. In 2007 and 2018
we received a grant from CNPq-ARC.
 
Event format: in-person or hybrid.
In-person, with online transmission of all lectures and conferences. The recordings will
later be edited and will remain available for free on the internet for viewing. These
materials will be used, firstly, by the community of more than 1000 ex-fabricantes, who
usually follow the various editions of Fábrica de Ideias.
 
Main contributions of the event in terms of science, technology and innovation, with a
description of the potential impact of the event on the area of knowledge in which the
proposal is being submitted:
Since its inception, there has been substantial interaction between Afro-Brazilian studies
– the study of racial hierarchies and the culture and identity they generated - and
African studies carried out in Brazil – the study of social phenomena on the African
continent – and African-American studies in the USA. In many aspects, we can even
talk about an entangled history of these three fields of study [Seigol, 2009, p. X-XIV],
where biographies, individual and collective emotions, projects of emancipation from
racism and colonialism, academic and political agendas are constructed transnationally
and the local can be part of the global. The power imbalance, however, is part of this
tangle and within this transnational exchange there are hierarchies, centres and
peripheries, “rich” and “poor”, racial tensions, imperial projects and attitudes, and the
coloniality of a large proportion of intellectual elites in countries of the Global South.
Such entanglement can be easily perceived by closely examining the trajectory of a
series of scientists that stood out in the elaboration of Afro-Brazilian studies in the
period between 1930 and 1970 and that, in most cases, after carrying out research in
Brazil, also carried out research on the African continent: E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo
Dow Turner, Melville and Frances Herskovits, Roger Bastide, Pierre Verger, Charles
Wagley, Alfred Metraux and Marvin Harris [Sansone, 2022]. In one way or another,
they were all related to each other, as colleagues or even friends, had research
experience in ethnic and African studies, and all also carried out research in Bahia.
These scholars and activists were also interconnected by the debate that received a great
boost in Bahia, namely that between E. Franklin Frazier and Melville Herskovits, which
is generally defined as the debate about the origin of the strong incidence of matrifocal
family arrangements in the population of African origin in the New World: it was about
the survival of African culture or adaptation to poverty and discrimination. This tense
debate was indicative of a situation much more complex around the question of how to
combat racism against people of African ancestry – emphasizing their cultural
difference or the universality of the human condition. The essence of this debate,
although based on research on poor families in Bahia, reflected the tension between
sociology and anthropology in the US and US racial politics, but would also later lead
to the major event sponsored by the UNESCO program dedicated to the study of racial
relations in Brazil in the period between 1950 and 1964, with which all of these scholars
were involved in one way or another. Although in a less direct way, these different or
even opposing perspectives influenced the debate about culture and local-national
identity during the anti-colonial struggle of former colonies Portuguese in the years
1960-1975. In this struggle, there was an opposition between a perspective mostly
anthropological focused on emphasizing cultural and ethnic diversity and a more
sociological vision that emphasized the universality of the human condition and the
need to deny old ethnic-cultural differences in favour of the creation of a new people
and a new type of man who would come after independence. At the Fábrica de Ideias,
our focus is on connections, intersections and the cosmopolitan nature of ethnic
identities and nationalism, rather than on separation and tension - supposedly intrinsic -
between African-American and African studies or on a narrow and largely nation-
centred understanding of the construction of nationalism. We trust that such perspective
will help highlight the various direct and indirect connections between the construction
of Afro-Brazilian studies and the intense, entangled and transnational relationship
between African Americans and Africans studies in the years 1940-1970 [see, among
others, Seigol 2009]. The studies of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous
people in Latin America are also connected to debates between African-American and
African studies, as well as the processes of identity formation among indigenous people
in Latin America, for example, through the emergence of manifestations of what is self-
defined Afro-indigenous people. In addition to drawing more attention to the transit of
ideas and notions between fields of study, and not just within them, we suggest giving
more importance to the biographies and trajectories of scholars who venture beyond the
borders of a single field of study, in an attempt to raise intersections and possibilities
that an exclusive focus on limits, animosity and power relations imposed by geopolitics
hegemony of knowledge could otherwise render invisible. Much of this entanglement
between fields of investigation and biographies is due to the central place that many
US-based foundations have served as resource providers in both fields of study. In
African and African-American studies, although foundations based in the USA are not
present in all of Africa and/or all of Afro-America, they have certainly been active in
many more places and contexts than is normally imagined. If any national and
transnational history of anthropology and disciplines-related issues must naturally
consider the geopolitics of knowledge [Patterson, 2001; Yelvington, 2006, 2011;
Parmar, 2012], it is also important to “follow the money,” asking who funds what and
why.
 
References:
Parmar, Inderjeet, 2012, Foundations of the American Century. The Ford, Carnegie and
Rockefeller Foundation in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Patterson, Thomas C. 2001. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States.
Oxford: Berg.
Sansone, Livio 2022. Field Station Bahia. Leiden: Cluster-Brill Series.
Seigel, Micol 2009. Uneven Encounters. Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the
United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yelvington, Kevin 2006. “The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean:
Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920–1940”, in Kevin Yelvington, ed.
Afro-Atlantic Dialogues. Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe: School for Advanced
Research.
 
The scholar responsible for the proposal presented here is also the event coordinator. The committee comprises senior researchers (several are also
CNPq fellows) from different disciplines and universities. Three of them are from
foreign institutions (University of Cape Verde, University of Bayreuth, Germany and
IRD, France), all of them have been participating for years in the Fábrica de Ideas and
have participated in one or more editions of the doctoral school.
Information about the proponent's experience in organizing scientific events similar:
Livio Sansone, proponent of this project, professor of anthropology at UFBA,
scholarship holder PQ Level 1B and associate professor at the University's Cluster of
Excellence Africa Multiple from Bayreuth, has coordinated Fábrica de Ideias without
interruption since its creation in 1998. Far from being an individual activity,
coordination results from the collaborative work team and is always made up of around
six colleagues. In this case, in the case of a wider Factory of Ideas, with a symposium
and then a doctoral school, which, furthermore, is part of the celebration of 65 years of
CEAO-UFBA, the team coordinated by Sansone is made up of 17 researchers, in
addition to the coordinator. Besides having been the chief organizer of the Factory of
Ideas, Sansone was the president of the XI Conlab that took place in Salvador in 2011
with 3000 participants and, throughout his career, he has presided over or participated in
the organization of several medium-sized symposiums, almost always supported with
resources from the Fapesb, Capes and CNPq. Especially from 2020 onwards, Livio
Sansone, together with his colleagues from Fábrica de Ideias team, has developed skills
in organizing intensive international seminars and symposiums both online and in
hybrid format, in most cases benefiting from the technical and scientific partnership
with the Africa Multiple Cluster and its extensive global network of researchers.
 
A brief history of previous editions, including information on possible financing:
The complete list of the 24 editions already held can be found at
www.fabricadeideias.ufba.br. For the first few years, from 1998 to 2007, see
de-id
The first ten years (1998-2007):
I 1998 Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
II 1999 Reproductive health and race relations
III 2000 Class, gender and race relations
IV 2001 New trends in ethnic and racial studies
V 2002 New trends in ethnic and racial studies
VI 2003 Post-colonial theories
VII 2004 Race and sexuality
VIII 2005 Colonialism, nation and race
IX 2006 “The Black Atlantic – the transatlantic circulation of the Ideas of Race, Racism
and Anti-racism.”
X 2007 Ten years of the Factory of Ideas: the Factory of Factories – Symposium on the
first ten years of the project - On this occasion, we reflected on the experience that
distinguishes the Fábrica de Ideias course, in national and international contexts as well
as about the future of the project. Due to this format, the presentation of papers in this
special edition of the doctoral school was only for former students and lecturers of the
Fábrica de Ideas. Students in the Graduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies
(POSAFRO), with which Fábrica de Ideias is closely associated, even those who until
then did not have attended the Doctoral School in previous years, could participate in
the event. In fact, in the ten-year celebration, the integration among the Posafro
students, around 60, and the 100 alumni of the first nine editions of the Doctoral School
was very positive and a source of inspiration.
XI 2008 Human Rights and Identity Processes, in partnership with the Teachers´
Training Centre of the State of Bahia
 
XII 2009 Body, Power and Identity
XIII 2010 Heritage, Memory and identity
XIV 2011 Diversities and Inequalities. Held within the scope of the XI CONLAB
XV 2012 Technology, consumption and identities - in partnership with Poscom
(Graduate Program in Communication) - UFBA
XVI 2013 Heritage and Identities
XVII 2015 – Lisbon, ISCTE - Encounters and disagreements in social sciences in the
Portuguese language
XVIII 2017 S. Luís e Alcântara (MA) Heritage, inequalities and cultural policies.
XIX 2018 Macapá (AP) Borders, in partnership with the Master in Border Studies at
UFAP
XX 2019 Salvador – The new era of extremes
XXI 2020 Online Pandemic and Utopias - Political agendas and emerging possibilities
XXII 2021 Online Pandemics and Utopias: durable inequalities and authoritarianism
XXIII 2022 Maputo - Biographies and Liberation (see article in the 2023 Cluster
 
2024 preliminary schedule:
Although the focus of the event is the 1990s, the panels and lectures of the doctoral
school are organized into four chronological axes, the time frame of which is not rigid,
about the creation and reconfiguration of African American and African studies since
the 1930s.
1. From 1900 to 1960: The “underdeveloped countries” and the Tropics are part of the
world that many today call the Global South as objects of research, especially because
researchers come from the North. Specific local contexts (Bahia, for example) are
constructed as ideal fieldwork stations.
2. From 1930 to 1970: The emergence and development of African-American studies
and African studies in Latin America and the Caribbean and cooperation with Africa.
The UNESCO project on race relations carried out in Brazil (1950-53) resonates not
only with Afro-American studies but also with African studies. Pan-Africanism created
its “capitals” or “meccas”, first in the heart of the colonial metropolises (New York,
Paris and London) and then on the African continent (Dakar, Algiers and Dar es
Salaam).
3) From 1970 to 1990: Under the influence of the period of African and Caribbean
independence, the spirit of the Tricontinental and the civil rights movement in the
United States, the field of African-American studies consolidates (even though with a
North and a South).
4. From 1990 to 2024: The contemporary period is full of contradictions. On the one
hand, there are affirmative actions in favor of racialized groups in countries that until
then defined themselves as mestizos as well as ethnic renaissance in Latin America,
significant advances in policies and practices around subaltern memories and cultural
heritage and in the creation of graduate studies in the areas of African-American and
African studies. On the other hand, we witness a socio-economic and geopolitical
reconfiguration of areas in the Global South, generally associated with the weakening of
the public sector and the advancement of new forms of conservatism. Within the scope
of this last axis, in partnership with the Latin American research network on Afro-
indigenous heritage, “Patrimoines Immatériels Afro-amérindiens en Amérique Latine” 1 ,
we plan to organize a round table dedicated to intangible heritage at the symposium and
two workshops dedicated to the same topic a round table dedicated to intangible
heritage at the Doctoral School.
First part:
September 2-9
Second part:
September 10-13
 
Information about the target audience and event participants, including quantity of
people attending:
The aim of the International Symposium is to bring together around 50 specialist
national and foreign scholars (with particular emphasis on African, Latin American and
Caribbean researchers) for three days. The doctoral school targets 50 junior researchers,
postgraduate students, recent PhDs, and postdoctoral fellows who will be selected
through two public calls, one national and one another international. Both the
symposium and the presentation portion of the doctoral school will be transmitted via
streaming as well as published on the Pós-Afro YouTube page, reaching a much wider
audience. The recordings, in addition, will be placed in a specific collection on the
Factory of Ideas website as well as on of the CEAO Afrodigital Museum. They will also
be used as inputs for other doctoral schools and research seminars and for the
organization of disciplines at the graduate level. In addition to the selected researchers
and students, thanks to the partnership with IRD, there will be twenty more participants
who are part of the network on Afro-Amerindian heritage, selected by a committee from
all over Latin America - 50% women, 50% cultural activists, 50% researchers and 50%
from countries other than Brazil. There will also be a set of public lectures.
As is already customary in previous editions of Fábrica de Ideias, the organization will
take care of reserving a guesthouse and a restaurant located close to CEAO so that
students who come from outside of Salvador can stay at a discount price and all
students, researchers and members of the organization can have lunch and dinner
together, also at an agreed price. Lunch and dinner are two important moments of
socialization in our Doctoral School, especially among students and senior researchers.
 
List of researchers invited to the symposium and doctoral school:
Americas:
Stephen Small (UCBerkeley)
Guillermo Navarro (UCosta Rica)
Isabel Hernandez (Museo de la Ruta de los Esclavos, Matanzas, Cuba)
Alejandro Frigerio (Conicet, Argentina)
Jhon Anton Sanchez (IAEN, Ecuador)
 
France:  Michel Agier (EHESS) 
 
Africa:
Colin Darch (SSRC, ZA)
Ciraj Rassool (UWC)
Chapane Mutiua (UEM)
Carlos Fernandes (UEM)
Teresa Cruz e Silva (UEM)
Patrícia Godinho Gomes (CODESRIA)
Cláudio Furtado (UNICV)
Tom Mboya (Moi University)
Enocent Msindo (Rhodes University)
 
Brazil:
Antônio Sérgio Guimarães (USP) cpf 065.202.865-91
Omar Thomaz (UNICAMP) cpf 14667187816
Luiza Nascimento Reis (UFPE) CPF: 014.222.225-94
Marcia Lima (USP) cpf 00742251705
Petrônio Domingues (UFS) cpf 180266738-59
Brice Sogbossi (UFS) CPF 053 674 557-94.
Viviane Barbosa (UFMA) CPF 988.342.073-00
Laura Moutinho (USP) CPF 940.073.147-72
Antonadia Borges (UNB) CPF 73480134068
Paulo Müller (UFFS) CPF 994.168.080-91
Melvina Araújo (UNIFESP) cpf 53527488987
Evaldo de Barros (UFMA) cpf 93518951300
Luena Pereira (UFRRJ) cpf 02143458746
Joselina da Silva (UFFRJ) 41924878704
Aldrin Castellucci (UNEB)
 
UFBA
Fábio Baqueiro (PPGH e Pós-Afro)
Iacy Maia (PPGH e Pós-Afro)
Jamile Borges (Pós-Afro)
Marcelo Mello (PPGA e Pós-Afro)
Jesiel Filho (Pós-Afro)
Valdemir Zamparoni (Pós-Afro)
Magali Almeida (Pós-Afro)
Livio Sansone (PPGA e Pós-Afro)
 
Effective availability of counterpart, infrastructure and technical support for the project
development:
CEAO has meeting rooms and infrastructure for holding meetings size and high-
frequency web connection to enable streaming transmission. The Centre for Afro-
Oriental Studies (CEAO) was established in 1959, in the South-South spirit around the
Bandung Conference, as a documentation and research centre specializing in Afro-
Bahian culture and the study of Africa and the global South in general. The centre is
now located in a large building in the centre of Salvador, with meeting rooms, a library
specializing in Afro-Bahia and African studies, and some rooms for visiting professors
and students. CEAO has a digital museum specialized in Afro-Brazilians themes and
develops research and seminars on a series of topics: Afro-Brazilian religions, racial
inequalities, university inclusion policies, as well as themes more specifically linked to
African studies. The centre has technical support and a secretariat for our event, which
will also benefit from the support of a number of undergraduate students who receive
from UFBA a small grant for this purpose. The homepage, in Portuguese and to some
extent in English - www.ceao.ufba.br - includes detailed information about the Fábrica
de Idéias Program as well as about the Afrodigital Museum
https://afrodigitalmuseu.uni-bayreuth.de/. In the last decade, CEAO has received
donations from the Ford Foundation, Sephis Program, Prins Claus Foundation, FINEP,
Fapesb, CNPq and Capes. As of 2017, CEAO and Posafro are an affiliated centre of the
Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple from the University of Bayeruth -
become a prominent research centre, based on training and research in ethnic and
African studies with a genuinely Atlantic and comparative international perspective.
CEAO publishes twice a year the Afro-Asia journal (Qualis A1) -
www.afroasia.ufba.br. In 2024, CEAO will turn 65 years old, and the next edition of
Fábrica de Ideias will also pay homage to this important centre in the Northeast and
include a panel on the history of the centre at the Symposium.
 
Scientific Dissemination Plan:
 
The papers presented at the symposium will be edited and published in a book, in both
print and digital format, and in two versions, English and Portuguese. The Factory of
Ideas 2024 will be in person, but will also be broadcast online and disseminated through
our international networks. The recordings of the symposium and conferences at the
doctoral school will be edited and made available on the site of Fábrica de Ideias and
the UFBA Afrodigital Museum, where we will create a collection dedicated to Fábrica
de Ideias, as well as that of the Cluster.
 
Estimate of financial resources from other sources by possible public and private
partners:
The 2024 edition of Fábrica de Ideias results from partnerships and collaborations
established in recent decades, including with former students. Firstly, it is worth
highlighting the collaborative network we have with researchers and centres of ethnic
and African studies, almost always within graduate programs, which connects UFBA
with UFRB, UNILAB, UFMA, UFPE and UNICAMP. This network allows us to
optimize resources, e.g. through a consortium that help circulate visiting scholars from
Africa through several universities. This type of consortium is particularly important for
universities in the Northeast, which generally lack resources for this internationalization
activity. Posafro functions, in fact, as an interinstitutional graduate program that
incorporates several professors from UFRB and UNILAB, which makes the relationship
between these federal universities in the State of Bahia particularly close. Regarding
support to hold our event, the graduate program involved will be responsible for tickets
and daily allowance for Brazilian guests and team members, with PROAP/CAPES
funding. The support from the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple at the University
of Bayreuth (Germany) is essential to make the Factory a truly international event and
guarantee the presence of students and academics (who may also teach at the doctoral
school) from its four centres in Africa, as well as, if possible, from other partner centres
in Africa, Asia and the rest of Latin America and the PhD school BIGSAS at the
University of Bayreuth. We plan to refine the scope and theme of the symposium and
doctoral school in direct contact and in cooperation with our colleagues in the four
Cluster centres in Africa (at the universities of Rhodes, Moi, Ouagadougou and Lagos).
The Cluster has already dedicated three symposiums (in Bayreuth, Seoul and
Grahamstown, South Africa) as well as several publications to review the construction
and practice of studies Africans, including in the Global South and the Far East. We will
also count on the support of the IRD (Institute for Research on Development, France),
especially with regard to respect to axis 4, in which the theme of heritage will be dealt
with in greater detail, within the scope of which workshops will be organized with
holders of traditional knowledge from various countries of Latin America. These
workshops are being organized with the researcher at IRD Christine Douxami, who
coordinates the international project “Patrimoines Immatériels Afro-amérindiens en
Amérique Latine”. We have already secured funding from the CNPq and hope to be 
able to count on support from another Brazilian federal agency, Capes. We have already
applied for support from the French Consulate in Recife to finance the participation of
four renowned researchers from universities in France: Stefania Capone, Kadja Tall and
Michel Agier. The Goethe Institute of Salvador will support us by making available its
excellent theatre for our opening sessions and public conferences. The support of
BIGSAS and the Cluster Africa Multiple will be decisive in guaranteeing the presence
of African students (from Bigsas and four centres of the Cluster in Africa).