Patricia Alves Ramiro

Researcher in residence at the Maison Suger from August to November 2026

Patricia Alves Ramiro is Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), where she teaches in the Department of Social Sciences and in the graduate programs in Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic career is embedded in several national and international research networks. She completed a first postdoctoral fellowship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), within the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP), in 2012-2013 under the supervision of Afrânio Garcia Jr., and a second postdoctoral fellowship in 2025-2026 at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGAS/MN-UFRJ) under the supervision of José Sergio Leite Lopes.

Her research focuses on the transformations of rural worlds in Brazil's Northeast, particularly in the state of Paraíba. More specifically, she examines changes in plantation society, labor relations and forms of domination, the reconfiguration of peasant communities, and agrarian reform. Drawing on both fieldwork and archival research, she analyzes the restructuring of rural social spaces and patterns of access to land, linking historical transformations, individual and collective trajectories, and state action.

The project

Title: Documentary Memory of Sugar Industry Workers in Paraíba

"This project is dedicated to the processing and analysis of a collection of documents from Usina Santa Maria, a sugar agro-industrial complex founded in 1931 in the municipality of Areia that went bankrupt in 1992. Comprising more than 10,000 administrative documents, including several thousand employee records, this collection makes it possible both to reconstruct the social profile of the workers and to examine the transformations in the world of work within the region’s sugar economy. Housed at the Central Archives of the Federal University of Paraíba, this collection is currently being organized, processed, and digitized. Its study is part of the broader project “Reconfigurations of the Social Space of the Brejo Paraibano in the 21st Century,” which focuses on the social transformations that followed the decline of the regional sugar economy. Drawing on this rare documentation, the research combines the preservation of industrial archives with sociological analysis to contribute to the social history of labor and to the understanding of the transformations of capitalism in rural Brazil."

Hosting Institution: Institut des hautes études de l’Amérique latine (IHEAL) – Centre de recherche et de documentation sur les Amériques (CREDA) – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle