Time flies. We remember receiving the applications for the 2018 cohort. Now they are already in the fourth semester and completed the research colloquium.
Each GSP group is different. Still, they all share one thing in common: a wide variety of education, personalities, cultural and social backgrounds, and ages always creates a multiplicity of perspectives. This complexity, however, is not free of patterns that show how connected our students are with current debates.
During the colloquium discussions, GSPians posed similar questions in different forms: Despite structural limitations, how can we make social change possible? How can we come up with non-violent ways of understanding multiplicity? How can we promote non-economistic approaches to inequality research? What steps can we take towards a peaceful existence with the planet earth?
These questions took different forms after being filtered through the lens of their research interests. A shortlist will not do justice to individual projects. Still, the following themes were persistent: Social Inequality and Stratification, Gender, Race and Ethnicity, Political Sociology, Immigration, Cultural Sociology, Civil Society, Human Ecology, Sociology of Cities, Education, Knowledge.
On the one hand, our students’ fields of interest reveal that they come from a broad spectrum of social science disciplines and academic cultures, and their education before GSP has influenced how they interpreted and learned from GSP. On the other hand, the way they formulated their research questions showed that GSP laid different layers on their existing perspectives. It is always exciting for us to witness this interaction. We have seen again that GSP never fails to deliver what it promises: critical young people who are interested in the betterment of life on planet earth.
From this perspective, there couldn’t be a better way to end the colloquium than with a talk by Professor Alejandro Bialakowsky from Universidad del Salvador, our Ph.D. partner, with the theme “Processes of Reclassification Between Domination and the Possibilities of Emancipation.” More information on the Ph.D. programme will be on the GSP website soon. We also thank Professor José Crisóstomo de Souza from Universidade Federal da Bahia for his participation.