The Edward Said Chair is a body linked to the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Unifesp, aimed at teaching, research and knowledge dissemination activities in the Humanities, around the following lines of research:
● Studies of Coexistence and Sociability.
It involves studies on the relationship between cultural history and forms of sociability, consecrated by humanist ideas and institutional advances, with respect to the aporias of contemporaneity, since they have become insufficient to contain regressive movements of societies.
● The Role of Intellectuals and Artists: Ideas and Figures.
It tries to understand the importance of the intellectual in the history of Culture and its metamorphoses in time, through the literary and artistic productions that constituted the spiritual patrimony and the strengthening of sociability ties when elaborating their inflection points and conflicts. It contemplates the problem of autonomy and its possibilities and limits in the face of the end of Humanism in contemporary times.
● The Stranger and the Stranger.
It proposes to analyze the question of identity in the horizon of the development of science and technology in its political implications that affect the dissolution of traditional symbolic forms of political and cultural roots as organizers of experience and thought. In this sense, it thematizes the suffering of identity and the contemporary forms of belonging that replaced the law - of a universalizing character - with particularisms, the idea of citizenship having given way to that of identities.
● Culture and Society - Middle East.
It focuses on the historical, cultural and geopolitical study of the Middle East and related regions, in their cultural, artistic and social plurality. It encourages the study of historical entanglements between the Middle East and Latin America, especially those that address intellectual, artistic and scientific exchanges, migratory flows and political reconfigurations.