Crossing dynamics? Observing changes in the experience of citizenship in Brasil from the perspective of its welfare state frontiers

• Grant number: 15/07857-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: September 01, 2015
• End date: August 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Fabiana Augusta Alves Jardim
• Grantee: Fabiana Augusta Alves Jardim
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The central issue of this research is to understand how the deep transformations that have taken place in Brazil during the last twenty years have changed the concrete limits of social citizenship. We also aim to understand how these changes affect every day-life of government employees - their work conditions, the meaning they attribute to their practices, the consequences to their professional identity, their perspectives of future and, last but not least, how they treat citizens they are intended to serve (citizens that range from the ideal citizen that policy makers have in mind, as long as those are universal and abstract ones). Therefore, our challenge is to understand contemporary limits of citizenship in Brazil, testing the foucauldian governmentality approach that, in this case, consists on taking citizenship as effect of crossing different social politics (education, health, social assistance, retirement etc.). These are the practices that make State real and concrete to citizens. Because of the theoretical and methodological approach we are assuming, we will attempt to achieve those aims by interviewing public servants that work directly attending citizens, on those agencies that are most distant to central State. As this research project is a medium term one, in this first phase (two years) we will center our focus on two social policies: education and social assistance. (AU)