In 2011, the Brazilian government launched a funding program
named Ciencia sem Fronteiras (Science without Borders) that provided grants and
scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students to go study abroad. Until 2015, the government will invest US$ 2.5
billion to send 101,000 brazilian students on courses at universities around
the world. As of this month, 70,188 students were already granted the funds.
But despite the amount of scholarships on the program, not a
single one has been, or will be given to
humanities or social sciences related field’s. This is because the program only
supports study and research on areas associated with the STEM fields, such as engineering,
technology, physical and health sciences, energy, oil, creative industries, and
so on.
Here is an example of what we have seen in the readings, specially
on Bob Jensen’s article, where he mentions that usually the research that fits
corporate demand, reach short-term results, or be turned into profits are the
ones which are actually valued. What the brazilian government also does with this
kind of politics is to reinforce the segregation between social sciences and
the “hard” sciences, adding another component to the so called social sciences
inferiority complex.
But as of written on The New York Times’ article, it is time
to stop emulating the physics science and start to grasp on other ways of doing
research, keeping in mind that the relationship between theory and empirical data
is not unbreakable, and that there can be another ways of answering important
questions about human behavior.
How we can do this, taking into account also the political factors
involving academia and mentioned on the Knight Blog, such as the tenure process,
the measuring impact of the published articles in journals, etc, is another
question that remains unanswered…
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