The Program
Mission
The Program aims to provide students with qualified professional and academic training in the field of Demography. A minimum set of required courses is offered, always associated with academic activities that favor an interdisciplinary dialogue between Demography and other areas of scientific knowledge.
The program offers theoretical, technical, and methodological knowledge relevant to the field of Demography from a perspective that values interdisciplinary studies. The courses offered seek to facilitate students’ contact with seminal works and current national and international scientific productions. The program attracts graduate candidates specialized in: Sociology, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics, Geography, and Architecture, among other areas.
The master’s program aims to introduce students to the field of Demography, comprehending all aspects related to population dynamics. It emphasizes the learning and application of the main methods of demographic analysis, always making connections with the theoretical interpretations of the obtained results.
At the doctoral level, the program is destined to candidates who already have the scientific expertise in research. Candidates are expected to be able to assimilate more advanced knowledge of demographic methods and to venture deeper into specific areas of population studies related to their dissertation project. Emphasizing innovation, be it technical, methodological, or theoretical, topics of reflection and analyses are addressed at the frontier of key areas of knowledge.
The proposed course places equal importance on applied demographic methods and their theoretical interpretations. The program has also increasingly incorporated NEPO's expertise in the field of Historical Demography. There is a consensus among the program’s faculty that studying the past’s sociodemographic scenarios is important to understanding the shape of today's population and its future trends. Historical demography is considered as one of the greatest contributions of Demography, given its ability to produce diagnoses, to design scenarios, to identify the forces that are forging the future of populations, and to subsidize the planning that leads to the best coping strategies, in light of social problems. It is always enlightening to appropriate the historical evolution of the population, since this allows us to distinguish the changes and continuities in the contemporary population dynamics while contrasted with that of other periods.
The Program is organized into two lines of research: 1) Population Studies and 2) Demographic Dynamics and Social Policies. The two lines of research include the following subject areas: Demography and Ethnicity; Historical Demography; Family, Gender, and Population; Formal Demographic Methods; Population and Environment; Spatial Redistribution of Populations; Health and Population(s); Reproductive Health and Sexuality. Candidates for the title of M.S. or PhD should choose, respectively, their thesis and dissertation topics, contemplating one of these lines of research and one of the aforementioned subject areas.
History
The Graduate Program in Demography is part of the Department of Demography at the College of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at the University of Campinas (Unicamp). Since its conception, the program has worked with the Elza Berquó Population Studies Center (NEPO) at Unicamp.
The graduate program in Demography at Unicamp was established in 1982 with the foundation of NEPO. The center was consolidated primarily as a space dedicated to interdisciplinary research, maintaining among its main objectives principles that have propelled the construction of the Graduate Program in Demography. Among these principles are: 1) the production and dissemination of original research in the areas of Demography and Population Studies, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary dialogue and the social relevance of demographic knowledge; 2) the implementation and development of research in the relevant thematic areas in population studies, with results that could serve directly or indirectly to guide the performance of public agencies; 3) collaboration with Departments or Associated Institutes at Unicamp and/or other Universities, promoting the formation of new research frameworks.
The course in Demographic Analysis, which was designed to address the existing gap in the training of qualified professionals in the area, was among the first activities offered in the program. In 1983, the PhD in Social Sciences was created at the College of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH)—at that time, the area of concentration “Population Studies” fell under the responsibility of professors and researchers at the NEPO. A decade later, the creation of the PhD in Demography at the IFCH was proposed. The program was approved by CAPES in 1992, and the first class was admitted in 1993. In 2002, the creation of the Department of Demography marked an important step in the consolidation and visibility of the field at the IFCH and Unicamp. That same year, the Master’s program in Demography was approved by CAPES.
The continuous expansion and qualitative evolution of the activities developed by the Program over the last 20 years have been recognized and lauded by peers—the program was evaluated by CAPES earning a grade of six (6).
The activities carried out in the year 2014 attest to the consolidation of the Program and continuous advances, based on academic excellence, internationalization, and the appreciation of knowledge that is grounded in reality and meets the needs and challenges of Brazilians in the third millennium.
Additional information about Unicamp, Campinas, visas etc. can be found in the International Students Guide.