IN2PAST – Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory has won the Call ‘O 25 de Abril e a democracia portuguesa’ (“The ‘25 de Abril’ and Portuguese democracy”), launched by FCT and the Mission Structure for the Celebrations of the 50º Anniversary of the April 25th Revolution of 1974, with the R&D project ‘Revolution, towards the history of the concept. Analysing Portuguese parliamentary debates, 1821-2024’, led by IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST researcher José Neves. 

The team will identify and analyse the occurrence and the different uses and meanings of the terms ‘revolução’/’revoluções’ in parliamentary debates from 1821 to 2024, thus contributing 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”, state the researchers in their application.

The empirical material to be analysed belongs to the archive of Assembleia da República (Portuguese parliament) and will be accessed through the ‘debates parlamentares’ (‘parliamentary debates’) website. Identification, contextualisation and signification procedures will be applied to the digitally processed text, combining quantitative and qualitative dimensions from the Digital Humanities, Data Science and Intellectual History.

Besides Principal Investigator (PI) José Neves, the team includes IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST researchers Joana Dias Pereira, Daniel Alves, Rita Luís and José Miguel Ferreira, CRIA – Iscte / IN2PAST researcher João Mineiro, CHAM – NOVA FCSH researcher Paulo Silveira e Sousa, CES – UC researchers Ana Drago and Miguel Cardina, CIES – Iscte researcher Goffredo Adinolfi, CEI – Iscte researcher Tiago Fernandes,  Bruno Damásio (NOVA IMS) and Co-PI Diego Palacios Cerezales (Universidad Complutense de Madrid).

Project ‘Revolution, towards the history of the concept. Analysing Portuguese parliamentary debates, 1821-2024’ (‘Revhiscon’) has a recommended funding of €24,925 and a foreseeable duration of 18 months, starting in January 2025.