This seminar begins from a place rarely visited by institutional studies of democracy: listening. Methodologies drawn from oral history, sociology, anthropology, and literary journalism open access to dimensions of democratic life that escape analyses centered on norms, institutions, and formal rights—affects, frustrated expectations, everyday forms of belonging and exclusion, and the memory of what was once lived as promise.
The second axis addresses the complementary movement: How investigating life stories, and the literary writing built from those accounts, does not merely record the particular but makes it possible to formulate hypotheses and sustain analyses of macro-historical processes. Drawing on the workshop leader's experience writing O que é Meu (What is Mine) and Geração Democracia (Generation Democracy), he will discuss how individual trajectories can serve as a key to reading broader transformations in a society.
This workshop is part of the project “Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars” (2025 LSA Advance Grant). Please register to participate and receive the readings. Graduate student Julia Dias of the UC Irvine Department of Political Science chairs the event.
About the Workshop Leader
José Henrique Bortoluci holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan and an M.A in history from the University of São Paulo. After 18 years as a university professor, he is now an independent scholar and writer based in São Paulo, Brazil. His literary debut, O que é meu (Fósforo, 2023; English: Fitzcarraldo, 2024), draws on interviews with his father, a truck driver for 50 years, to retrace the recent history of Brazil and his own family; it has been translated into 12 languages and won the 2023 APCA prize in the essay category. His second book, Geração Democracia (Fósforo, 2026), first serialized in the magazine piauí, gathers the life stories of Brazilians born in the mid-1980s, during the country's political reopening.
For more information on the workshop, please email Assistant Professor Eraldo Souza Dos Santos at eraldo.souzadossantos@uci.edu.
