The project places the lusophone Africa, Brazil and Cuba as component parts of a single cultural system, woven around the Atlantic. Concerned primarily with the formation of identities, the project focuses on the so the called “luso-iberian” territory from the point of view of cultural hybridity, as a space that allows exchanges and antagonisms, looking for the African youth movements (like Hip Hop) in the Information Society. The route outlined here is the interfaces between the media (ICTs), cultural identities and citizenship. We will work with young people from the peripheries of urban and rural areas of lusophone and iberian spaces.
We are interested especially in the forms of access and uses of new technologies by young people, taking into consideration all the political/social frame of these contexts of Africa and its diaspora. So, even though we have very different situations in the places chosen for this project, we have, on the other hand, similarities with regard to identities, which explains, in part, our choice including the Lower Congo as a single zone within the we’re calling “lusophone”, there by going beyond language barriers and envisioning the concept as something larger, encompassing historicity and cultural complicity.

The purpose of this work is focused on a multidisciplinary and transversal way, seeking in their ethnographies the questioning of how the young people appropriate music and new technologies as a negotiating tool with the public space, which obviously it will lead them to seek conceptual framework that could direct us to a critical reflection on issues of “belonging”, “tradition”, “rupture” and “continuity”. The use of new technologies and manipulation/reelaboration of identities through the use of particular languages (local, national or even creating specific language) through medias such as community radios, mobile phones, internet, social networking will be our aim.