Political Demands in Brazilian Science Education Scholarship

Recently, we have experienced a long period of weakening of democracy and institutional dismantling in Brazil, which lasted until 2022. Concomitantly, the coronavirus epidemy got large proportions in the world, particularly in our country. Even though we achieved the victory of former President Lula in October of 2022, we experienced explicit threats to democracy and persistent disregard for the pandemic by the president in office until then. Our recent history has made us more aware of the relevance of promoting political reflection on educational processes in general and in science education. In this regard, the theoretical conception of the social and articulatory practices given by the theory of discourse (Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. Hegemonía y estrategia socialista: hacia una radicalización de la democracia. Siglo XXI, 1987) appeared adequate. It allowed us to identify contingent discursive formations, which have been articulated in Brazilian science education scholarship, due to the demands generated in the political scenario. We propose the following research questions: how are hegemonic discourses constructed in Brazilian science education scholarship? What hegemonic discourses and possible discursive inflections can be perceived due to political and health demands generated in this historical scenario? Our findings revealed hegemonic discourses that reduce political demands to the investigation of educational policies, which has been resulting in a process of depoliticization of Brazilian science education scholarship. When the whole world was under the impact of the pandemic, only two articles mentioned the tragedy we lived in Brazil, where a denialist government was behind the death of 700,000 people from COVID-19.