This line of research focuses on the different records of social experiences and practices of unarchiving with the aim of developing narratives about lived experiences in both public and private spheres. It welcomes research proposals that reflect on issues related to narratives of a memorial, biographical, literary, and historiographical nature. Within the scope of this theme, the different aspects of the notions and practices of memory are discussed from individual and collective perspectives. From an individual perspective, it addresses the experiences of ordinary people and leaders who worked in various areas of social life, including political parties, institutions and civil society entities. Regarding the collective dimension, it seeks to accommodate reports derived from group experiences that account for segments which experienced common events and shared group practices from ethnic, racial, gender and class perspectives. It recognizes the multiplicity of discourses that contribute to the writing of History and the importance of memorialists, archivists and writers, aiming to explore the meaning of these practices and their contributions to historiography in different times and places, especially in the 20th century. It seeks to broaden the notion of historical source and objectify it in guiding research that relates society, culture, power and their modalities of discursive representation. This line’s concern with temporalities refers to the exercise of thinking about the rhythm of experience and the context of writing, involving objects and interpretations within the horizons of an approach that articulates diachrony and synchrony, past and present. Since it is a line of research constructed within a Program that meets the demands of students from different cities in Bahia and Brazil, it accepts projects that are nuanced according to their proponents’ places of origin. This proposition considers the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the investigations developed in this line as a device attentive to the need to address the themes in a way that adapts the objects of investigation to the dynamics of the theoretical debate in the field of historiography and its critical inflections.

The themes addressed by this line of research are linked to the theme of labor in its multiple dimensions, articulating the worlds of labor with the diversity of social practices of the subjects. It concerns the intersection between slavery and freedom, seeking to integrate studies on enslaved, freed, and free workers, and the establishment of connections between slavery and the post-abolition period. It encourages the analysis of individual and/or collective trajectories that reveal life experiences constructed not only in the spaces of production of material wealth, politics, and power, but also in the most varied environments of coexistence, leisure, and sociability. This line of research is connected to the theoretical and methodological reflections of Social History, highlighting the influence of authors such as Eric J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. In this case, the concepts of experience, formation, and class identity are of particular interest. The line of research also draws on Carlo Ginzburg and his reflections on microhistory and the evidentiary paradigm. From a perspective oriented towards the field of culture, it seeks to understand class strategies, world perceptions, memories, identities, values and beliefs, therefore welcoming research that covers diverse aspects of life in society in Brazil from the colonial period to the 20th century.