Center for the Study of Citizenship Rights (CENEDIC) 

Center for the Study of Citizenship Rights (CENEDIC) 

CENEDIC is an interdepartmental research center linked to the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of the University of São Paulo (USP). It was founded in 1995 by a group of professors and researchers from the Department of Sociology of FFLCH, the Architecture Department of the USP Campus in the city of São Carlos, the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, the Departments of Sociology and History of the State University of Campinas, and the Department of Sociology of the Federal University of São Paulo.

Since its foundation, CENEDIC has dedicated its efforts to the study of social, political, and economic transformations in Brazilian society brought about by the changes in contemporary globalized capitalism. Even though the center comprises researchers with different theoretical references and empirical themes, its constituent group has established, by way of a constant debate, a specific approach to analyze such transformations. The focus lies on the notion of citizenship rights as it aims to formulate the field of tensions and conflicts through which the meaning of rights is disputed as a possibility for democratic and republican expansion. This approach stems from a legacy enabled by the cycle of social, cultural, and labor movements of the 1980s, which, notwithstanding its vicissitudes, explicitated the political empowerment behind popular participation in Brazil and led to substantial effects on its institutions. Concurrently, the CENEDIC is committed to an epistemological critique of the tools used by the social sciences when analyzing not only the contemporary changes in the pacts between government and society, but also the language through which such transformations are formulated, a crucial element for understanding the dynamics of social problems and their critique as well as the possibilities and impossibilities of their resolution.