VERBAL PORTRAITS

A project by: Mariano Sardón (UNTREF) and Germán Ito (UNTREF)

Research Students: Lucía Carvallo (UNTREF), Cecilia Cisneros (UNTREF), Nahuel Rodrigues (UNTREF), Julián Gorrini (UNTREF) and Lautaro Julian Sardelli (UNTREF)

Past Research Students: Graciana Luna (UNTREF) and Santiago Terigi (UNTREF)

All around the world, human displacement has been an ordinary process for a very long time. War, discrimination, economic issues, religion, ideology and racism, to mention some, are only a few reasons for masses of people leaving their countries, roots and relatives, looking for other places to live.  

Argentina is considered an immigrant country with a lengthy history of immigration processes, and is currently receiving people, mostly from bordering countries plus some citizens from African and Asian nations. On the other hand, recent events in the Middle East have generated a huge displacement of Syrian refugees to Europe.  In our cities, people are suddenly aware of new faces that appear in the streets ;  this «sudden appearance» is the very experience of the otherness. 

Who is it? is the main question everybody makes in front of the presence of the «other», a topic also developed in social cognition studies today. 

Verbal Portraits aims at capturing such an “otherness encounter” in both cities by means a participative proposal adapting methods for social judgments studies used in the neurosciences.