Back to Anthropology
2017 was the craziest year of my life and together with the Digital Media Post-Grad and the HCI MA, I started my Masters in Anthropology at UFPR with the idea of researching how the sunni muslim community in Curitiba organized themself online.
The research object changed during the process and my thesis is about how the same sunni group organizes themself online and offline, or, as I called the thesis, beyond the wall of “reality”. This interface between on and offline is a big thing to the community, mainly because Islam is not a major religion in Brazil, so internet is actually a great spot to spread the word of Islam.
Well, this Masters took longer than the expected and I finished only in 2019, after participating of many academic events an rewriting a lot my own text. The final thesis can be read, in portuguese, here.
In the middle of this process I had to choose between the Anthropology MA and the HCI MA, because I wouldn’t be able to graduate in both by the same university at the same time. I have choosen Anthropology because I was part of the scolarship program and it was the best for my financial life at the time.
With my Masters title on hand I thought I would never be back at the academic world, but with the Covid19 pandemic and its quarentine, I began to miss my college life and the anthropological discussions raised on classes. At the same time I realized that to have some kind of recognition as a Researcher in Brazil I would have to be a PhD. With that on mind I proposed a dissertation project to 2021’s selection of the Anthropology PhD program at UFPR and I got accepted.
The second year of quarentine, than, was full of learning and great discussions that made my research skills got even more complex and wide.
By now (2022) I am focused on discovering my new research field / object, to get deeper on my PhD candidate lifestyle.
Disclaimer: if you don’t know, to research in Anthropology is based on: a lot of field research (ethnography) added to reading a lot of classical and contemporary texts and making sense of the combination.
