The results of the eighth edition of the FCT’s Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEEC) have been announced, with the IHC being awarded 13 contracts: six in the Junior Researcher category and seven in the Assistant Researcher category, which will result in the recruitment of nine new members to the Institute. Two of these applications were also supported by IN2PAST.

In the Assistant Researcher category and within the Arts panel, Ana Bigotte Vieira and Catarina Laranjeiro had their projects approved. Ana will analyse the history of the concept of dance in the 20th century, establishing a dialogue with Performance and Dance Studies. Catarina will conduct research into the audiovisual cultures produced in and originating from self-built neighbourhoods of African diaspora communities in Portugal, framing these practices as sources of alternative interpretations of urban spaces.

In the same category, but in the History panel, Elisabete Pereira and Tijl Vanneste were also successful. Elisabete aims to fill a gap in our understanding of the formation and provenance of collections originating from colonised peoples and held in African and European museums, by conducting a comparative analysis between the National Museum of Archaeology (Portugal), the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale (France) and the National Museum of Kenya. Tijl’s project aims to compare the tourist and ethnographic visits made to the diamond mines of Lunda (Angola) and Kimberley (South Africa) during the colonial period. Such visits, which subsequently resulted in press articles and exhibitions, helped to shape a stereotypical and reductive image of ‘Africans’ in Europe and the United States.

We will also be welcoming Eduardo Ascensão, Eszter Varsa and Moira Patricia Pérez to the IHC as Research Assistants. With a project submitted to the Social and Economic Geography panel, Eduardo Ascensão, who was already collaborating with the IHC, will explore various theoretical approaches to urban renaturalisation, conduct ethnographic research into current initiatives that enable nature to return to cities, and identify sites for future renaturalisation projects in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Eszter Varsa and Moira Patricia Pérez presented their projects in the History panel. The former will draw on the extensive literature on agrarian socialism and women’s labour activism, written in Eastern Europe between the 1950s and 1980s, to investigate the labour activism of rural women in Hungary during the interwar period. The latter proposes a theoretical and applied study of the ways in which state-promoted public history addresses coloniality and how this manifests itself in that history as an omnipresent matrix of power.

Regarding the ‘young’ Juniors, Ana Temudo and Inês Vieira Gomes, who are already collaborators, will now join the IHC as result of the projects that have now been funded. Ana will explore how ethnographic museums can be reimagined as spaces for restitution, community participation, and performative pedagogy in Portugal and West Africa, within the current context of reparations and decoloniality. Inês aims to analyse the relationship between women photographers and colonial spaces and experiences, adopting a gender perspective that proposes rewriting a history of photography (one that is not centred on male protagonists).

We will also be welcoming four new Junior Researchers: Alba Martín Luque, Carla Andrés Bauzá and Daniel Cannales Ciudad from Spain; and João Fusco Ribeiro from Portugal. Alba aims to reconstruct the planning, political conception and visual practices underlying the anti-colonial uprising of the Union of the Peoples of Angola (UPA) in 1961, drawing on an explicitly anti-colonial perspective. Carla will reinterpret the Black uprisings in the Caribbean between the 1860s and 1880s, demonstrating the fundamental and specific roles played by women of African descent, who demanded liberation from slavery, called for racial equality and forged anti-colonial resistance. Daniel intends to analyse the role of European lawyers and international associations of jurists in shaping transnational opposition to the Franco and Salazar dictatorships between 1945 and 1977. Finally, João aims to analyse the political, economic and military interactions between the People’s Republic of Poland and the liberation movements and decolonised states of Portuguese-speaking Africa during the Cold War.

We welcome this excellent (and unprecedented) result and regret that so many other candidates, of equal calibre and diversity, did not have the opportunity this year to secure a CEEC contract.