The International Prize in Cultural Studies Virgínia Quaresma is promoted by the University of Aveiro, with the support of the International Network of Cultural Studies (RIEC) and the National Network of Cultural Studies (RNEC), with the sponsorship of the Regional Directorate of Culture of the Centre. In the 2022 edition, the Centre for Intercultural Studies (CEI) of ISCAP-P.PORTO was chosen to represent RNEC in the jury of this Prize, through its researcher Clara Sarmento.
In this edition of the International Prize in Cultural Studies Virgínia Quaresma, the Career Prize was awarded to the Belgian philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray. The Best PhD Thesis in Cultural Studies Prize was awarded to Sofia Pinto, for her thesis Urban Failures & Other Imaginations: Walking, Writing, and Transgressing the Gendered City, for her PhD in Cultural Studies at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
Sofia Pinto’s thesis articulates street art, graffiti and practices or performances of intervention and resistance in urban surfaces with a disruptive analysis of normative patterns in public space, following a political, interdisciplinary, intercultural, feminist and queer perspective, which discusses questions of power, the politics of doing, of representativity, performativity and narration. For the jury of the 2nd edition of the Prize, besides the originality of the study and the solid theoretical support, the thesis follows a methodologically creative path, carrying out an ethnographic research, interviews, immersion in the real and virtual territory, participative observation, together with a judicious analysis of text and image, which questions and impacts the contemporary reality, both in Portugal and in Brazil.
The Virgínia Quaresma Award also attributed two honourable mentions: to Nicola José Frattari Neto, for the thesis The Working Class and Its Places: ways of life of those from below in the lands at the margins of Tijuco, Minas Gerais (1850-1950), at the State University of Campinas, and to Mara Pieri, for the thesis Chroniqueers: time, care and visibility in narratives from queer people with a chronic illness, at the University of Coimbra.
In 2022, the prize received a total of 39 applications from 20 institutions in Portugal, the United States, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil.