Research Areas

1 The first line of research concentrates on the crisis of the social institutions that articulate, 1) at the macro level, social order, integration and solidarity, and, 2) at the micro level, the meaning of life and social identity:

  • Crisis of the nation-state and of conventional politics: economic, political and cultural globalization; new forms of mobilization and protest not assimilable to conventional forms of political activity.
  • Crisis of institutionalized religion and secularization processes in countries with a Catholic tradition.
  • Crisis of the centrality of work: fall in labor demands, unemployment, non-conventional forms of work.

2 The Center’s second line of work deals with social zones of emergent meanings, where references to strong identities are redefined, and where new social networks with varying degrees of institutionalization are formed:

  • Emerging forms of sociability: non-durable consumer, leisure and cultural creation activities that are generationally-oriented and alien to the logic of modern societies.
  • Non-traditional forms of culture and political action: new forms of social participation and political mobilization that substantially modify the sense of politics.
  • Scenarios of creation and management of identities, expressed in relationships of pure sociability such as the night, forms of urban nomadism, spaces of consumption, and certain forms of cultural heritage.

3 The Center’s third line of research refers to the relationship established between knowledge, identity and social change in reflective societies. Therefore, our main interest is to investigate how identity changes as a consequence of:

  • New processes of learning and construction of meaning in the so-called information and communication societies.
  • Production of knowledge in social contexts of increasing globalization and mobilization of products and actors.
  • The centrality of the expert and techno-scientific discourses (including sociological) in social life.