Do Campus ao campo: uma análise etnográfica e crítico-discursiva do Curso Superior de Tecnologia em Agroecologia do IFPE-Campos Barreiros.

Abstract

This thesis has the general objective of critically investigating, on the “community floor”, whether the agroecological discourse of Higher Education in Technology in Agroecology at IFPE-Campus Barreiros has become a relevant social practice for professional training and social and sustainable development of the settlements of Mata Sul-PE. The specific objectives are: a) to analyze whether research participants understand Agroecology as a social practice that seeks to build other ideological bases for land use and as a social movement that opposes the hegemony of agribusiness; b) analyze how the lexical choices mobilized in the discourse of graduates and teachers reveal the social and identity representations of graduates from their professional training in Agroecology; c) identify intertextual networks in the graduates’ discourse that reflect the dimensions of Agroecology; d) analyze whether the teachers' discourse encourages questioning of the historical structures of domination arising from Agribusiness. The Higher Technology course in Agroecology was implemented at the IFPE-Campus Barreiros in August 2011. The formal teaching of Agroecology emerges as a counter-hegemonic paradigm to industrial capitalist agriculture and to break with the standardization of an agricultural production model. The research is based on the need to understand through discourse whether the professional practices of the course translate into social practice for the self-emancipation and social change of agents who still fight against the colonial and hegemonic culture of monoculture rooted in this region. The theoretical foundation of the research is a transdisciplinary approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with an emphasis on the postulates of Fairclough (1992 [2016],1989, 1999, 2003) and language studies of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (LSF), of Halliday (1994) and Halliday & Matthiessen (2004, 2014). The methodology was field research with a qualitative and ethnographic approach, from a critical interpretive perspective of the discourse. The sample was made up of five teachers, two members of the ONG Centro Sabiá, ten graduates and eleven non-graduate family farmers. The corpus was constituted from semi-directive interviews and structured questionnaires. The data collection stage was carried out using these two instruments, the interviews were recorded, later transcribed and analyzed from the perspective of ACD and LSF, based on the understanding that language, as a human action, constitutes social reality through struggles for power and changes in contemporary society and discourse comprises a practice that involves various agents, institutions and organizations in the exercise of power and the struggle for power. ACD and LSF integrate text analysis with the analysis of social phenomena. The main results of this investigation indicate that the course has been a strategic resource for the socioeconomic transformation and autonomy of family farmers in the region given the socio-historical context of Mata Sul-PE. However, the speeches reveal a series of factors that impede the integral development of agroecological practices, among them: the persistence of monoculture, the lack of knowledge about Agroecology, the distance between the IFPE-Campus Barreiros and rural communities, the absence of public policies and incentives from municipal managers, infrastructure deficiency and lack of public notices for hiring graduates. The data point to the need for IFPE-Campus Barreiros, as the course agency, to rethink intervention practices to strengthen the minority population so that they can achieve autonomy in agricultural.