About

This is the website of the Laboratory for the Sociology of Association Processes (LaSPA). Information and material concerning LaSPA are gathered here, along with a collection of study notes from research group members on works related to the LaSPA field of activity (list of quoted texts / study notes). This website was created on April 13, 2021, replacing the former LaSPA website. To contact LaSPA, write to:

LaSPA
LaSPA is based at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and coordinated by Pedro P. Ferreira (Department of Sociology). LaSPA aims to foster research about the association processes that assemble human societies and groups, and to provide its members with a collective context of theoretical and methodological experimentation.

In general, the study of association processes privileges the interactional and contextual dimensions of social practices, i.e., the ways social groups are performed in different ways and with different resources, by agents situated in different assemblages. This approach is more interested in sociogenetic processes than in the maintenance of already consolidated social orders, facing these as limit cases of the former. It is an effort to discover new (or renewed) ways to coexist, without reducing them to concepts and categories already marked by assumptions about "humans" or "society".

More specifically, the study of association processes was repositioned in the contemporary sociological agenda by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, which since the 1980s has been able to conjugate, in the study of technical, scientific and economic processes: the north-american microsociological traditions of interactionism and of ethnomethodology, the cyberfeminism of Donna Haraway, and the French "minor" philosophical tradition of Tarde-Bergson-Simondon-Deleuze-Stengers. LaSPA is engaged in continuing this work, putting resources developed by ANT and its theoretical-methodological lineage at the service of specific issues and problems faced by contemporary Brazillian Social Sciences.

LaSPA promotes regular meetings to debate texts and topics related to its members' researches, and welcomes researchers from all levels (Undergraduate, Master, Doctoral and Post-Doctoral), interested in the socio-anthropological study of association processes.

HISTORY
The beginning of LaSPA dates back to 2010, when Ferreira was a professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences (DCSo) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). LaSPA was a derivation, in São Carlos, of the research group Knowledge, Technology and Market (CTeMe), created by Ferreira and Laymert Garcia dos Santos at IFCH-Unicamp, in 2003.

In 2011, when Ferreira became professor of Sociology at IFCH/Unicamp, he transferred LaSPA to this university, and since then he has been promoting it as an environment for studies, research and debates involving sociology, anthropology and philosophy of science and of technology.

In 2021, after completing 10 years at Unicamp, LaSPA was finally registered in the Directory of Research Groups of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and gained this new website, in recognition of its institutional consolidation.