Alain Touraine and Brazil: dialogues

• Grant number: 16/05245-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: July 01, 2016
• End date: November 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Elide Rugai Bastos
• Grantee: Flavio da Silva Mendes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/13347-0 - Alain Touraine and Brazil: dialogues, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

Alain Touraine is one of the most influential French social scientists of the twentieth century, with an extensive production dedicated to social movements and sociological theory. In addition to these themes, the author gave space in his works to Latin America, a region with which he has strong relations since the 1950s. In these texts, Touraine presents his vision of development, class structure and the State in periphery countries. Such reflections are the result of dialogues established with important authors of Latin American sociology, among which stand out many Brazilians. When he was in the country in the early 1960s, Touraine contributed to the creation of the Centro de Sociologia Industrial e do Trabalho (CESIT), attached to the Chair I of Sociology at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), under the leadership of Florestan Fernandes and his most prominent student, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The dialogues between Touraine and Brazilian researchers have continued since then: the French sociologist directed theses about the Brazil in France and remained close to the Latin American intellectual and political debate over the following decades. This relationship influenced his production on social movements, which, in turn, echoed in Brazil when the same theme came to the attention of our social sciences during the 1980s, in the context of democratization. This research is aimed to investigate the contents of this intellectual dialogue and its protagonists. In addition to the exposure of the main ideas of Touraine and his Brazilian partners, I intend to assess whether and how they influenced the decision making of social and political actors on two important moments in our recent history: the beginning of the 1960s, in the beginning of studies of industrialization within the Brazilian social sciences, and the 1980s, when the discipline was determined to understand the political scenario of the end of the dictatorship and its main actors.