The Three Achilles' Heels of Brazilian Political Science (original) (raw)
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By coincidence, 2016 was the fiftieth anniversar y of both the creation of UFMG's Department of Political Science and the launch of the journal Dados, which would become the main channel for disseminating a portion of the most important social science research conducted in the country. The two events prompted a series of commemorations and reviews, the most important being publication of the book A ciência política no Brasil (1960-2015) (Avritzer, Milani & Braga, 2016), edited by the Brazilian Association of Political Science (ABCP), in which diverse authors analyse different aspects of the discipline's evolution in Brazil. 2
The article traces the trajectory of institutionalization and autonomization of Political Science within the Brazilian academic field and, to this end, takes the post-graduation as object of study and as a fundamental space to understand the processes of building of this area throughout the twentieth century. Its more general objective is to understand the conditions of possibility of the construction of anacademic space specific to Political Science in Brazil, a task developed from a quanti-qualitative approach marked by the revision and dialogue with the literature and by the work with data about the post graduate programs. The text ends by pointing out thecorrelation between the classical aspects discussed when it comes to objectifying Political Science (such as: relative "backwardness", relation with Sociology or even the financing of international agencies) and the master's and doctoral courses that formthis area. It contributes to the debate about the role of postgraduate in the construction of the relative autonomy of Political Science in the Brazilian academic universe.
Political Science in Brazil: An Analysis of Academic Articles (1966-2015)
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The article analyses the production of Brazilian political science, as published in six periodicals (Dados, Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais, Novos Estudos Cebrap, Lua Nova,Opiniao Publica and Brazilian Journal of Political Science) over a period of five decades (1966-2015). The text emphasizes two aspects: first, the distribution of articles by thematic areas of political science; and second, the type of method used, with an emphasis on the variety of statistical procedures used by the authors. The article observes the growing volume of articles published by Brazilian political scientists, particularly from the second half of the 1990s. One of the conclusions of the paper is that although statistics are used - and in recent years more advanced techniques have spread - Brazilian political science is far from being considered an eminently quantitative discipline.
Separate Tables: Thematic and Methodological Divisions in Brazilian Political Science
Brazilian Political Science Review, 2024
This study delves into the thematic and methodological configuration of Brazilian Political Science. Through the study of the relational dynamics between different research agendas and their specific approaches, we identified the centrality of certain themes and the methodological density within Brazilian Political Science. We conducted an analysis of 1,849 PhD theses and Master dissertations completed between 2013 and 2020 in eleven Postgraduate Programs. Our examination encompassed titles, abstracts, and keywords in these works, with data sourced from the CAPES theses and dissertations Catalog. The thematic network showed the emancipation of this academic field, revealing the consolidation of five distinct thematic communities. These communities encompass the major canonical themes of mainstream Political Science: 01. political theory, 02. State, government, and international relations, 03. social actors, participation, and public policies, 04. political institutions and State powers, and 05. parties, elections, and legislative studies. The methodological network revealed a semantic structure that mirrors this thematic division, with each community exhibiting unique styles, research methods, and investigative techniques. These findings are in line with assessments emphasizing the institutionalization of Brazilian Political Science. This institutionalization is manifested in the predominance of research themes intricately linked to politics (and not to the economy, society, etc.) and greater methodological refinement.
Brazilian Political Science Review, 2013
In this article I shall analyze the content of Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos' research, carried out between the decades of 1960 and 1970, and in the end perform an assessment of his contribution to the studies of Brazilian political thought. In summary, from his research there emerged a thesis for the existence of a national political culture; that Brazilian political thought was its intellectual product par excellence and that it would not be possible to comprehend the rugged Brazilian political process without studying this phenomenon.
Brazilian Political Science Review, 2007
, of the Federal University of Bahia, is a landmark in the welcome, but still incipient, process of decentring of Brazilian political science. I say this because the nine studies compiled promote significant displacements in relation to three of the guiding axes of Brazilian politicology, those being the thematic, the methodological and the spatial axes. With regards to the thematic axis, the book in question, by focusing on government structures, public policies and the role of political elites in several Brazilian states, carries out a significant "correction of course" in relation to the still predominant emphasis on institutions, processes and players of the federal and municipal levels. If, on the one hand, the country's academic researchers have only recently turned their attention to the ongoing processes of de-fragmentation of public administration in Brazil-following through on the perception of the limitations and perversities of the autarchic and predatory municipalism-, which led to more consistent inter-municipal cooperation and to a revaluing of regional planning, on the other, the state sphere remains seriously neglected, even considering the well-known exceptions that seem only to confirm the rule. As for the methodological issue in Brazilian political science, or its "heel", so sharply pointed out by Soares (2005), the book reviewed here promotes a second displacement Carlos Aurélio Pimenta de Faria bpsr (2007) 1 (2) 225 224-230
The discipline of international relations in Brazil: An analysis from the sociology of science
Revista Científica General José María Córdova, 2019
The sociology of science has become increasingly important, and progressively used by the academic community around the world to account for the development and evolution of different disciplines. Although these studies are conducted regularly in the United States and Europe, international relations, in Latin America, have been seldom explored from the sociology of science. Thus, this article intends to take the first step in this regard. Based on a case study in Brazil analyzing international relations as a discipline in that country, and according to the methodological contributions of Randall Collins, it evaluates and provides feedback on the status of international studies in this national context.
O Ensino e a Pesquisa Sobre Política Externa No Campo Das Relações Internacionais Do Brasil
AUSTRAL: Brazilian Journal of Strategy & International Relations
The purpose of this article is to analyze teaching and research on foreign policy in Brazil in the last two decades. The first section discusses how the main narratives about the evolution of International Relations in Brazil, considered as an area of knowledge, depict the place that has been designed, in the same area, to the study of foreign policy. The second section is devoted to an assessment of the status of foreign policy in IR teaching in the country, both at undergraduate and scricto sensu graduate programs. There is also a mapping and characterization of theses and dissertations which had foreign policy as object. The third section assesses the space given to studies on foreign policy in three academic forums nationwide, namely: the meetings of ABRI (Brazilian Association of International Relations), the ABCP (Brazilian Association of Political Science) and ANPOCS (National Association of Graduate Programs and Research in Social Sciences). In the fourth section there is a ...
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ACADEMIC FIELD IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN THE NORTHEAST REGION OF BRAZIL (Atena Editora), 2022
The present study seeks to investigate the relationship between the standards of scientific production and the training academic policy, through the struggles generated between the different positions of agents belonging to the field of Educational Policy of the stricto sensu Postgraduate Education programs in the Northeast region of Brazil. To this end, supported by sociological practice and the Pierre Bourdieu's scientific field theory, the emphasis falls on the agent that produces one academic work representation on the subject of a scientific and institutionalized nature, as well as the social conditions of its practice. The agents within such a space, endowed with a system of dispositions, with specific competencies, different types of capital and their interests, confront each other in the struggle to legitimize a certain conception about the themes, local and regional; which is, above all, a way of looking at the academic social world. Methodologically, we sought to establish the structure of the production academic space, through the use of structured interviews, so that the formation trajectories could be identified academic-professional of the agents and the conditions of scientific production. The organization of the field takes place, above all, through the disputes undertaken by peers in the search for scientific authority, that is, the conquest of scientific credit hasfundamental importance in the publishing market, where research results gain projections at scientific community and turn into credits that, consequently, are exchanged for others.