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Activity Funded

Revolution, towards the history of the concept. Analysing portuguese parliamentary debates, 1821-2024

Revolução, para a história de um conceito. Análise de debates parlamentares portugueses, 1821-2024.

Reference
2023.10725.25ABR
Project Start Date
2024-09-23
Project End Date
2026-09-22
Principal Investigator
Coinvestigator
Scientific Area
Humanities
Funding Program
O 25 de Abril e a democracia portuguesa

Abstract

The idea of revolution has been a major protagonist in the history of the contemporary period. Both the generic concept of revolution and concrete revolutionary events have shaped ways of intervening and interpreting reality all over the world. They have been part of the horizon of expectations, the memory and the geographical imagination of various sectors of the population and have aroused the adherence and opposition - but also negotiation or adaptation - of different social groups and millions of individuals. Many historians have delimited the contemporary era by reference to the moments of rise and decline of the idea of revolution: from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the end of the USSR and the crisis of the revolutionary ideologies associated with the October Revolution of 1917. By analysing the frequency and meanings of the use of the term revolução/revoluções in Portuguese parliamentary debates, this project will contribute to a history of the concept in Portuguese political culture. We share the understanding that discourses are both cause and effect of the historical processes in which they participate, and that language and the practices of conceptualisation and categorisation reflect and construct the reality to which they refer. Specifically, we will identify and analyse the occurrence and the different uses and meanings of the term revolução/revoluções in parliamentary debates from 1821 to 2024. The empirical material we are going to analyse is physically in the archive of Assembleia da República, but we will access it through the "debates parlamantares" website, run by the same institution. The digitally processed text will be subject to identification, contextualisation and signification procedures that will combine quantitative and qualitative dimensions, combining Digital Humanities, Data Science and Intellectual History. And although the empirical corpus being analysed is limited to the institutional domain of parliamentary life, the diversity of our team's profiles enables us to understand the relationships established between the MPs' speeches and other domains (from published opinion to cultural and intellectual production, including non-institutional political forces). The quantitative treatment of the text will make it possible to identify sets of occurrences that will be subject to finer discourse analysis exercises. We have already registered a total of 20,514 occurrences of the term in speeches made in Portugal at the various courts, chambers, congresses, senates and national assemblies that have met since the beginning of the constitutional monarchy. Roughly half of the occurrences took place after the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which makes this and the democratic period privileged objects of our attention. By making it possible to identify differences and continuities in the political culture prevailing in the regimes whose succession made up the political-institutional history of contemporary Portugal, the chronological scope of this project will place the historicity of the April Revolution on a timescale longer than the usual. This will also allow us to understand the emergence, renewal, dispute, censorship or crisis of the revolutionary sensibility in Portuguese political culture during the contemporary period. Furthermore, the empirical material will be analytically situated beyond the limits suggested by methodological nationalism. Revolutions were political and social turning points in the history of different countries, but also vehicles for international relations and dynamics that crossed national and continental boundaries. They also maintained a close relationship with the history of European empires and the emergence of a post-colonial world. The contemporary revolutionary experience has taken on national, but also transnational and global contours, making a significant contribution to moulding the feelings of geographical belonging of societies, groups and people. In short, with this project, the history of the April 1974 Revolution will be viewed from the perspective of the intellectual, cultural and social trajectory of the idea of revolution itself - a trajectory of longer duration than the chronology of the 1974-1975 biennium authorises, and with much broader borders than the national ones. The project will result in the publication of 1 book provisionally entitled "A questão da revolução no parlamento português" (The question of revolution in the Portuguese parliament), to be proposed to the Colecção Parlamento, under the tutelage of the Assembleia da República; 1 book provisionally entitled "The Transnational Memory of the Carnation Revolution: from Eugène Delacroix to Alexander Kerensky", to be proposed to the book series "Memory Studies: Global Constellations" (Routledge); 1 digital map on contemporary revolutions, with didactic objectives and which will be built from the invocation of these revolutions in Portuguese parliamentary debates.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)

Other Institutions

  • Instituto de História Contemporânea (IHC)
  • Universidade Nova de Lisboa NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS)
  • Laboratório Associado para a Investigação e Inovação em Património, Artes, Sustentabilidade e Território (IN2PAST)
  • Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
  • Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA)
  • ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (ISCTE-IUL CIES)
  • Universidade de Coimbra Centro de Estudos Sociais (UC CES)
  • CHAM Centro de Humanidades (CHAM/NOVA FCSH/UNL)

Funding 24.925,00 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

24.925,00 €