The Center for Critical Imagination (CCI) was created within the scope of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) in São Paulo with support from the Open Society Foundations (OSF).

A member of the Emerging Political Economies (EPE) network, the objective of CCI/Cebrap is to collaborate collectively in the formulation of alternatives to the neoliberal paradigm based on the Brazilian reality.

Using interdisciplinary approaches, the CCI/Cebrap will map current global development trends and critically analyze proposals for overcoming the neoliberal paradigm, dialoguing, above all, with proposals originated by members of the EPE network.

Its current main areas of research are “Inequalities and development in metropolitan and non-metropolitan contexts” and “Public sphere, representation and democracy”.

The first aims to investigate dynamics of informality and precariousness in the urban labor market and forms of domination in rural territories, considering contexts related to the platformization of work, the ecological transition and the construction of a national care system.

The second line of research aims to understand in depth the emergence of new forms of political representation in the public sphere in the face of the reconfiguration of relations between the state and civil society, especially the rise of far-right digital parties and the growth of evangelical churches.

The idea is that investigations carried out in both research areas can formulate original diagnoses of current trends and encourage the imagination of new forms of social and economic organization in Brazil within a global perspective.

In this sense, Cebrap’s intellectual tradition is of fundamental importance for the CCI. Cebrap has long been recognized for its original and high-impact contributions to the Brazilian reality in a global context, such as the formulation of Dependency Theory, an important source of inspiration for critically thinking about Brazil’s place in the midst of new global development trends.

The CCI today houses senior researchers, researchers and students from different areas of knowledge. In addition to offering free public training and courses to the general public, it will also carry out scientific dissemination initiatives for its main discussions and research, with the aim of expanding the field of debate in the country.