Screened at the opening session of the festival “Triste Para Sempre” in Lisbon, in December 2024, the film “Alma Anciana” (ancient soul) tells the intertwined stories of three elderly groups whose vastly different family ties and trajectories paint a profound picture about care, vulnerability and resilience. Set in Porto (Portugal), Vienna (Austria) and Havana (Cuba), […]
Categoria: Migrants
Durante a II Guerra Mundial, no prosseguimento da invasão e da ocupação de países europeus, desencadeou-se a espiral de terror por parte do exército nazi e, por consequência, a fuga de milhares de migrantes em busca de refúgio. O Governo de Portugal, tal como de outros Estados na Europa, adotou uma prática restritiva quanto aos […]
“I know I’m not alone here. I didn’t come to Portugal to die,” says one of the characters in the play A feia (Teatro da Comuna, Lisbon, 2024), reflecting on her oncologic treatment. The text of the play, which incorporates excerpts from Professor Clarice’s Diary of a Courageous Woman and a publication by Lara Vaz […]
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialised or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the […]
The earthquake of the latest 6th of February was the “greatest tragedy since 1939” in Turkey and led Syria to a situation “worse than the war” that the country has endured for more than a decade, according to a piece’s title of Diário de Notícias newspaper[1]. Nevertheless, in a search on its website for the […]
In this tenth blog post, I depart from the analyzes by René Girard (1988, 1997, 2001) and Levine (2011) to reflect upon the scapegoat dynamics that affect individuals and groups – in a spectrum that ranges from particular family dynamics that exclude certain individuals, unfavorable school and work contexts, to the social exclusion of entire […]
Last September, I started to notice the first news about the rapid increase in the number of arrivals from East Timor, followed by the identification of some immigrants living and working in poor conditions in agricultural zones of Alentejo (south of Portugal)[1]. I’m not sure if the arrival of three thousand East Timorese people between […]
The inherently political nature of migration – immersed in the paradox of being a publicly engaging topic but also highly contested, internationally important although context specific – makes it controversial to attribute meaning. As Moore observes, migration is a “(…) contested and continually reinvented concept conditioned by multiple specific, local and transnational heterogeneous contexts”[1]. As a […]
Although there are a relatively considerable number of news pieces on migration, we barely see migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers quoted in the news. Without truly hearing them, we can’t acknowledge their perspective. Ester Minga At the beginning of May, I watched the play Une Histoire Bizarre, directed by Sebastião Martins and produced by Associação […]
This is the second part of a blog post introducing my postdoc research project with Nepalese Female Migrants from the 1st and 2nd generations in Portugal within the framework of the IHD – Integral Human Development postdoc program at CADOS, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2022.