Sentidos de mercado instituindo a reforma curricular para os cursos de Engenharia

Abstract

Under the post-structuralist approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse Theory, it is presented, in this thesis, the investigation of the relations that constitute curricular policies for the Engineering courses in Brazil and what is produced from them. In this investigation, the significant “market” is pointed out as a nodal point capable of agglutinating several other signifiers that operate in the social imaginary as a representation of different demands in the varied contexts of curricular production for Engineering, producing effects on the political process and, thus, guiding curricular actions for the Engineering courses in the country. The shared senses about this significant express the demands inserted in a chain of equivalence. Thus, it is argued that this chain is formed against an antagonistic exterior represented by all who block what has been considered the new identity of the engineer, that of an innovative engineer. This antagonistic exterior is supposed as a threatening for the country’s development. In this process, it operates a ghostly logic in which market service is interpreted as the guarantee for both the economic and social development of the country and for the maintenance of the innovative engineer identity. This study was developed with support in the theoretical-strategic approach of critical explanation, as Jason Glynos and David Howarth propose, through which was tried to decipher the logic that characterize the practices of the processes of the curricular reform of the engineering, the ones that enable them and those that allow themselves to be kept or sustained. Through this argument, it is advocated the thesis that the curricular reform of the Engineering courses in Brazil is involved in a ghostly logic of market service and development of the country, contributing to try to define the modes of action in universities and fix the subjects who work in the curricular reform as responsible for success or failure of education in this area. It is also argued that the proposals contemplated in the reform document consist only of some of the infinite possibilities for this curriculum, since some of the differences between the articulated demands for its constitution are only crashed, awaiting the movement of new articulations so that they resurface in the political game.