O sujeito e seu lugar no mundo na BNCC: pensar o lugar como significante flutuante em suas relações com o sujeito

Abstract

This paper proposes to critically examine the notion of "place" in Geography, discussing the disputes over meaning that permeate this term within the context of the normative policies of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC). The starting point is an interest in considering how the term "place," mobilized by the BNCC as a significant element in the formation of a critical subject, can empty out the multiplicity and trajectories that constitute it. As Rodrigues and Costa (2019) point out, although Geography in the BNCC presents guidelines for the development of spatial thinking, there is a tendency towards standardization and the dilution of territorial experiences. Drawing on a post-structuralist perspective, with an emphasis on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the curriculum is understood as a discursive practice and a field of struggle, in which different discourses compete for the hegemony of meanings and forms of knowledge. In this sense, the name "place" is treated as a floating signifier, devoid of fixed meaning, and continuously resignified in specific contexts. An analysis of the thematic unit "The subject and their place in the world," in the geography component of the BNCC, reveals the limits of a proposal that, in seeking to universalize spatial experience, risks obscuring the multiplicities that constitute the subjects. In contrast, Doreen Massey's approach offers an understanding of place as a multiple, open "entanglement of stories" permeated by power relations. The text of this research explores different conceptions of curriculum, from traditional approaches to critical and post-critical theories, to challenge how curricular documents seek to fix identities and truths. Authors such as Lopes and Macedo (2011), Costa (2018), and Cunha (2009) maintain that the curriculum is a political and cultural movement, traversed by disputes involving the selection of knowledge, the production of subjectivities, and the exclusion of voices. It is observed that the BNCC operates as a device of regulation and control by defining and developing essential and "universal" competencies that guide the construction of an idealized subject. In this movement, it is understood that the attempt to stabilize the meaning of "place" and to form a standardized subject tends to limit the emergence of plural and unpredictable readings of the world. Instead of fixing meanings or closing off possibilities, I offer this text as an opening for tensions and displacements that may enable an education sensitive to multiplicity and the permanent negotiation of meanings.