Launch of Maria José Oliveira’s book, based on her PhD research at the IHC. Presentation by Fernando Rosas at the Aljube Museum in Lisbon.

A las Barricadas: Os Portugueses na Guerra Civil de Espanha

A primeira grande investigação transnacional sobre os portugueses que combateram pela República em Espanha e foram vítimas da repressão franquista.

Quão estranho é pensar num jornaleiro nascido na aldeia de Bogas de Cima armado com uma caçadeira e cartuchos de dinamite, pronto para combater nas montanhas asturianas por um país onde não nasceu?

Os protagonistas deste livro viviam em Espanha em Julho de 1936, quando eclodiu a guerra civil: são homens e mulheres que lutaram contra o golpe militar, que pegaram em ferramentas e armas de caça, que foram para as linhas de fogo com as roupas do trabalho. Nasceram em Portugal, mas foi em Espanha que constituíram família, que saltaram de emprego em emprego, que ganharam consciência política. E foi por esse país que sofreram e morreram, vítimas da justiça militar franquista e do vasto catálogo repressivo da ditadura.

A partir das suas histórias individuais, numa investigação transnacional que durou oito anos, A las Barricadas resgata da invisibilidade vidas de diáspora e resistência, dá nome e biografia a portugueses que foram presos, condenados à morte ou a longas penas de reclusão, repatriados, espoliados de bens e dinheiro, submetidos a trabalhos forçados e obrigados ao exílio.

Mais informações sobre o livro

A science fiction discussion group open to the entire NOVA community, focusing on works that explore the future and the very process of creating fiction.

Nas Margens do Possível:

um grupo de discussão de ficção científica

Nas Margens do Possível é um grupo de discussão de ficção científica dirigido aos membros da comunidade alargada da Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Uma vez por mês, investigadores/as, estudantes e outros trabalhadores/as interessados na ficção científica enquanto categoria literária, histórica, e artística, reúnem-se para explorar as dimensões narrativas e visuais de obras seleccionadas. O foco do grupo será em obras que interroguem o futuro e o próprio processo de ficcionar, tanto através da especulação perspectiva como da prospectiva. Interessa-nos examinar tanto a sua dimensão histórica como o seu potencial para imaginar o futuro, mapeando os padrões complexos de relação entre humanos e mais-que-humanos que estão na génese de muitas destas histórias e da sua articulação com a sociedade. O programa alterna entre livros, ensaios e filmes para permitir uma discussão sobre as formas diversas de narração deste género, procurando, também, uma justaposição de temas, abordagens e metodologias para pensar as paisagens temporais expressas na ficção científica que permitam, por um lado, análises contextuais e cumulativas e, por outro, a construção de novos processos colaborativos de trabalho entre os intervenientes.

Curadoria: Hélia Marçal e Rui Lopes
Organização: Instituto de História da Arte e Instituto de História Contemporânea (NOVA FCSH)

Programa 2026

14 de Outubro: Os Despossuídos (The Dispossessed), Ursula K. Le Guin (1974). Introdução por Rui Lopes.
11 de Novembro: “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, Saidiya Hartman (2008). Introdução por Hélia Marçal
9 de Dezembro: Quest, realizado por Saul Bass, Elaine Bass (1984). Com visualização do filme. Introdução por Rui Lopes e Hélia Marçal.

Apoios: Este grupo é apoiado pela FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., no âmbito dos projectos UID/00417/2025 (DOI https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00417/2025), UID/04209/2025 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/04209/2025), LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020), e contratos 2023.11076.TENURE.193 e 2023.11076.TENURE.202.

An informal gathering organised by the Culture Research Group. A conversation with Raquel Schefer over lunch in the staff canteen at the Almada Negreiros College.

Inquietações Apetitosas

O encontro Inquietações Apetitosas é um novo evento organizado pelo Grupo de Investigação “Cultura: Poder, Mediações e Artes” do Instituto de História Contemporânea. Aberto a todas as pessoas do grupo, mas também a qualquer pessoa que deseje participar, o encontro será a ocasião para uma breve apresentação da pessoa convidada, geralmente de passagem ou recém chegada ao IHC, e que partilhará a seguir algumas “inquietações” dos seus trabalhos de investigação.

O primeiro encontro será com Raquel Schefer (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) e terá lugar entre as 12h30 e as 14h no dia 12 de Novembro, na copa do Colégio Almada Negreiros (3º andar).

Tragam o vosso almoço!

A documentary film screening as part of a series linked to the exhibition ‘1936–1939: A Fractured Spain’, on display at the FCSH. With director Ana Pérez Quiroga in attendance.

¿De qué casa eres?

de Ana Pérez Quiroga (2024)

Este ciclo de cinema propõe uma reflexão sobre as marcas da Guerra Civil de Espanha e as suas reverberações na memória colectiva e individual. A partir de duas obras documentais singulares e complementares, somos convidados a questionar o peso do silêncio, a transmissão do trauma entre gerações e a urgência do resgate histórico. O ciclo abriu com El silencio de otros (2018), de Almudena Carracedo e Robert Bahar, um retrato comovente da luta das vítimas do franquismo que, ao longo de décadas, procuraram justiça perante o “pacto do esquecimento”. Filmado ao longo de seis anos, o documentário acompanha a batalha legal e humana contra a impunidade, dando voz àqueles a quem a história tentou calar.

Em diálogo directo, apresenta-se ¿De qué casa eres? (2024), da artista visual e realizadora Ana Pérez Quiroga. Partindo de uma perspectiva intimista e explorando os arquivos da memória familiar, o filme aborda o conflito espanhol através das redes de afectos, da pertença e do impacto do exílio e da identidade fragmentada nas vidas individuais. Entre o colectivo e o privado, este ciclo convida o público a um debate essencial: como se constrói a memória histórica e de que forma o cinema pode ser uma ferramenta contra o esquecimento?

A sessão irá decorrer no contexto de uma aula aberta. Na conversa com a realizadora e artista, Ana Pérez Quiroga, irão também participar: Catarina Alves Costa, Pedro Aires Oliveira, Isabel Araújo Branco e Golgona Anghel.

Sinopse do documentário:
¿De qué casa eres? foi a questão enfrentada por quase 3000 crianças espanholas exiladas na União Soviética durante a Guerra Civil Espanhola (1936-1939). Este filme narra a história de uma delas, Angelita Perez, que viveu em internatos russos dos 4 aos 24 anos, até concluir os seus estudos de medicina em Moscovo. É uma história de resiliência, amor e identidade, que entrelaça passado e presente, história e memória. O filme também explora o vínculo entre mãe e filha – a realizadora e sua mãe – através de músicas e histórias compartilhadas. Revisitar a jornada de Angelita é, ao mesmo tempo, uma homenagem à sua força e uma declaração de amor.

Aiming to raise a host of questions rather than provide the answers, the 4th Counter-Image unpacks the earth not as theme but rather as onto-episteme.

Counter-Image International Conference 2026

How to speak with(in) the earth? Situated knowledges, unnaming methods, and visions of the threshold

The question “How to speak with(in) the earth?” is not a metaphor but a political, ontological, and epistemic imperative in the face of ecological collapse, the exhaustion of anthropocentric frameworks, and the representational models of the colonial-capitalist regime and its paradigm of territorial expansion and occupation—the plantation, whose logic of extraction, objectification, and extinction persists (Le Petitcorps et al. 2023; Bastos 2020; Thomas 2019; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2015; McKittrick 2013; Mirzoeff 2011; Stoler 2008, 2016; Hartman 2007). The Posts—postcolonialism, postmodernism, posthumanism—we insist on using to make sense of a world yet to be overcome are being replaced by the prefix Geo (Pratt 2025, 2022; Coelho & Ponce de Léon 2025; Krieger 2022; Ray 2019, 2026; Latour 2018; Povinelli 2016). The “advent of the Geo,” Mary Louise Pratt (2025) points out, marks a shift in scale (from the global to the planetary), imaginary (from the political to the ecological), and temporality (from historical time to deep time—the geological). This shift implies questioning what we take for granted and adopting alternative ways of thinking and producing knowledge that Gabriela Milone and Franca Maccioni, in “The Land of Language, the Language of the Earth” (2025), have described as “geo-logy” (the language of the earth) and “geo-graphy” (the writing of the earth). This also entails “speaking with the earth” rather than “about the earth” and in terms of “similarity” rather than “difference”—a “work of imagination” and “experimentation.” Emphasising subjectivation rather than objectification (Kopenawa 2010); prioritising fusion rather than occupation (Krenak 2022).

“How to speak with(in) the earth” is therefore inseparable from the question of how the earth has been constituted as object, resource, and image—a point addressed by Ursula K. Le Guin in She Unnames Them (1985). This short story explores the colonial impulse to name and identify, creating artificial boundaries, while at the same time urging us to find ways to speak with other creatures. Speaking “with” or “as” rather than “about” the earth signals an epistemological shift, requiring a rethinking of its naming, mediation, and representation. What if the earth were not the referent of discourse but its condition? What if the possibility of speaking with/as the earth opened a space between the individual and the multiple, between situated territory and planetary totality? This dialectic is methodological: a practice of “unnaming”—of eroding the semantics of objectification, extractivism, and extinction. If the earth has been mapped, renamed, and fenced in (and private property created), it is also resistance, cosmoperception, and ritual.

The 4th Counter-Image unpacks the earth not as theme but rather as onto-episteme. It focuses on situated knowledges rooted in territories, bodies, and relations that thrive within the cracks of colonialism and capital, rather than the universal, logocentric language that separates subject from object. It challenges the anthropocentric semantics of positivist science and its fictitious objectivity to instead promote unnaming methods that suspend colonial taxonomies, while enabling the soil, the fossil, the animal, the plant, the stone, the tree, the river, the mountain, the lichen, and the fungus to reveal their unique and interconnected existences. It rejects the pseudo scientific “view from nowhere,” favouring visions from the threshold—those shaped from our grandmothers’ porches or at dusk/dawn in dialectical, incandescent images of impossible syntheses.

Keynote speakers:
Gabriela Milone and Franca Maccioni (Universidade Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)
Felipe Milanez (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil)

Call for papers

Aiming to raise a host of questions rather than provide the answers, the 4th Counter-Image asks: what does it mean to think with/as the earth rather than about it? Is it possible to translate the language of the earth, animals, plants, and minerals? Is “unnaming” a philosophical-aesthetic method? How the visions from the threshold suspend extractive regimes of representation? What kind of artistic practices resist, reconfigure, or disrupt colonial regimes over the land? How to foster forms of belonging, care, and reparation towards a post-extractivist world? Anchored in Portugal’s Southern region of the Algarve, but broadening its connections to other territories, we invite researchers, artists, activists, and essayists to submit proposals engaging with the following thematic axes::

1. Situated Knowledges
How and what does the earth remember? This thread welcomes works grounded in relational compositions and geo-subjectivities that challenge the “view from nowhere,” as well as uncertainty, failure, and contradiction, encouraging the connection between research and lived experience.

• “Terricidio” (Millán 2024) and buen vivir
• Artisanal epistemologies (Farago et al. 2025) and epistemologies of the South
• Decolonial, anti-extractivist, ecofeminist, queer, and trans ecologies
• “Exilic ecologies” (Marder 2023)
• Indigenous and Afro-diasporic cosmopolitics
• The baldio and the quilombo/quilombismo (B. Nascimento 1977, A. Nascimento 1980)
• “Insurgent Archivings” (Biehl 2022) and counter-cartographies
• Environmental struggles, their mourning, and multispecies justice
• Critique of Linnaean taxonomies and biopolitics
• Environmental histories, landscape politics, and “pyropolitics” (Marder 2020)

2. Unnaming Methods
If the act of naming is colonizing, how can unnaming promote relationality? This thread welcomes works on geo-semantics and methodological and pedagogical experiments that challenge extractivist and speciesist perspectives.

• Unnaming as a philosophical-aesthetic method
• Poetics of silence and deep listening
• Walking as method and “seeing with the whole body” (Cusicanqui 2015)
• Animal, mineral, and “fossil ontologies” (Castro 2023)
• Geo-aesthetics (Coelho & Ponce de Léon 2025; Krieger 2022; Ray 2019), including volcanic and so-called weed aesthetics
• “Liquid alliances” and aesthetics (Mendes & Garcia-Antón 2026)
• Narratives of relationality and multispecies methods
• “Contracolonizar” (Nêgo Bispo 2015)
• Art as a laboratory of thought (rather than representation)
• Animist cinema and anti-extractivist and anti-speciesist visual assemblages

3. Visions from the Threshold
How to inhabit the threshold and move between worlds? This thread welcomes forms that transcend the dualistic principles of the Plantationocene/Capitalocene–the geo-choreographies that broaden affinities and alliances.

• Epistemologies of the threshold
• “Dark ecology” (Morton 2016), deep time, and submerged temporalities
• Grassroots ecology
• Non-human agency and the redistribution of the sensible
• “Ruins of the Plantationocene/Capitalocene” (Tsing 2015).
• “Interstitial zones” (Gomez-Barris 2017) and riverside and seaside knowledges
• Dialectical images (Benjamin 1940) and “image-skins” (Kopenawa 2010)
• “Ch’ixi” visions (Cusicanqui 2015)
• “Affective alliances” (Krenak 2022)
• “Florestania” (Krenak 2022) and “struggling with the forest” (Milanez 2024

Important dates:

25 May | Proposal submission
30 June | Notification of acceptance
18-20 November | Conference

Submission formats:

1. Papers (theoretical or empirical research): 300-word abstract
2. Artistic interventions (performances, poetry readings): 300-word description
3. Discussion circles, workshops, listening walks, affective cartographies: 300-word description

Abstracts (in English, Portuguese or Spanish) should be submitted along with a short bio (100 words) to: counterimageconference@fcsh.unl.pt

>> Download the call for papers (PDF) <<

Organising Committee

Inês Beleza Barreiros (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH / CIAC — University of Algarve)
Liliana Coutinho (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Maria do Carmo Piçarra (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Salomé Lopes Coelho (ICON — Utrecht University / ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Sílvia Leiria Viegas (CIAC — University of Algarve)
Teresa Castro (IRCAV — Sorbonne Nouvelle / ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Teresa Mendes Flores (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)

Scientific Committee

Ana Lúcia Marsillac (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Bruno Mendes da Silva (CIAC, University of Algarve)
Cristiana Bastos (Instituto de Ciências Sociais)
Filippo Di Tomasi (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Iacã Macerata (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Isabel Stein (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Leila Lehnen (Brown University)
Luís Trindade (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Margarida Brito Alves (IHA — NOVA FCSH)
Margarida Mendes (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
María Gloria Robalino (Washington University St. Louis)
Maria Teresa Cruz (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Marita Sturken (New York University)
Maura Castanheira Grimaldi (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Mirian Nogueira Tavares (CIAC — University of Algarve)
Patrícia Martins Marcos (University of Oklahoma)
Patrícia Martinho Ferreira (Brown University)
Paulo Nuno Vicente (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Rui Gomes Coelho (Durham University)
Susanne Knittel (ICON — Utrecht University)

Meeting that seeks to open up reflection on a variety of subjects and themes related to the history of Portuguese migration during the interwar period.

Between wars and peace:

New Perspectives and Challenges of Portuguese Migration (1914-1945)

This event aims to bring together scholars working on the history of Portuguese migration during the interwar period. Its objective is to create a space for dialogue and scientific debate based on a multidirectional and multi-geographical perspective, in order to highlight the contributions and new research approaches toward which the scholarly community has more recently turned.

The nineteenth century and the period of the Trente Glorieuses have been privileged in studies of Portuguese migration. Whether focusing on migration to transatlantic or European countries, some works have addressed the interwar period; however, these remain fragmentary and, in some cases, outdated. It is therefore necessary to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of this migration, its stakes, and its impacts, within a national and international political context marked by profound change.

The interwar period constitutes a key moment in the history of Portuguese migration. It is characterised by a renewal and intensification of international migratory movements in the aftermath of the First World War; by the strong attraction exerted on migrant workers by transatlantic countries such as the United States or Brazil; but also by the opening of new destinations, such as France, which from the 1960s onward would become the main country of settlement for Portuguese migrants. This period also corresponds to a moment when measures aimed at strengthening control over migrants’ entry and presence were implemented, particularly in the context of the 1929 economic crisis and the Great Depression.

The event thus seeks to open up reflection on a variety of subjects and themes related to the history of Portuguese migration, mobilizing both multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives that make it possible to understand and critically examine this phenomenon. It is addressed to researchers working on Portuguese migration in both transatlantic and European contexts.

Keynote speaker: Cristiana Bastos (ICS — University of Lisbon)

>> Programme (PDF) <<

Call for papers

The topics that may be addressed include:

• World Wars and Portuguese migration
• Exile, opposition, and resistance
• Reception and support networks
• Political and trade-union engagement
• Irregular emigration
• Migration, migrants, and police and administrative management
• Emigration and immigration policies
• Policies and practices of exclusion
• Migrant agency
• Community structures
• Health and Portuguese migration
• Migration, voluntary and forced returns
• Migration and the press
• Memory of Portuguese migration
• Any other topic deemed to be of scientific interest for understanding the history of Portuguese migration during the interwar period.

Submission of proposals

Paper proposals should include an abstract (up to 250 words), a title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and a short biographical note (up to 200 words). Proposals in French, English, and Portuguese are accepted.

Proposals should be sent to the email address histmigport@gmail.com by 30 April 2026.

>> Download the call for papers (PFD) <<

Organisation

Cristina Clímaco (Université Paris 8 / LER)
Yvette dos Santos (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)

Scientific Committee

Alberto Pena Rodriguez (Universidad de Vigo)
Armelle Enders (Université Paris 8 / IFG Lab)
Delphine Diaz (Université de Reims / CERHIC / IUF)
Érica Sarmiento (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)
Heloisa Paulo (University of Coimbra)
Irene dos Santos (CNRS / URMIS)
Marcelo Borges (Dickinson College, Carlisle)
Marie-Christine Volovitch Tavares (CERMI)
Philippe Rygiel (ENS Lyon / INRIA)
Sónia Ferreira (CRIA — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Sylvie Aprile (ISP)
Victor Pereira (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)