Connections between Brazil and the United States: mapping the circulation of health education proposals and printed materials

• Grant number: 23/17882-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 03, 2025
• End date: May 02, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha
• Grantee: Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha
• Host Investigator: Walter Jerome Jose Davila
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
• Associated research grant: 18/26699-4 - Knowledge and practices in frontiers: toward a transnational History of Education (1810-...), AP.TEM

Abstract

This project aims to conduct a research internship abroad under Dr. Jerry Dávila supervision (Department of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States). Linked to the research financed by CNPq (Research Productivity Grant) and the FAPESP Thematic Project Knowledge and practices on borders: for a transnational History of Education (1810-...), the project focuses on examining the connections between Brazil and the United States regarding children's health and, more specifically, the education of children in hygiene and health-related themes, in the first decades of the 20th century. The focus is on the activities of the American Child Health Association and the Child Health Organization. The initiatives aimed at teaching hygiene and health notions to children implied the displacement of people and objects in different directions, border crossings by professionals on study trips and internships, exchanges of the most diverse types, loans, translations, and adaptations. This intense flow put doctors, health educators, and school nurses into circulation. Their luggage carried books, reports, and other records of the knowledge they contacted. In investigating the connections between the two countries, the aim is to find the threads that link the work of these two associations to the training processes of Brazilian professionals who traveled to the United States as Rockefeller Foundation fellows. The objectives of the research internship are to expand the corpus of books and printed materials produced by these organizations for children's health education. We also intend to gather documentation that will allow us to advance our understanding of the proposals around which the production of these printed materials was articulated. Furthermore, we want to collect elements to deepen the analysis of the circulation processes of the proposals formulated by these organizations, the printed materials they produced, and the subjects who, crossing borders, appropriated these proposals. The project is inscribed in the perspective of the transnational history of education since it aims to examine the exchanges between these two countries, which put subjects, knowledge, and objects into circulation, involving agreements with international agencies, civil society organizations, and government organs of public health. The work plan for the research internship in the United States aims to enable a foray into the archives of the New York Academy of Medicine and the Rockefeller Archive Center to collect documents produced by the two entities, accompanied by the systematization and analysis of these sources.