Global Arenas of Knowledge: Perspectives from the Brazilian Case

This paper aims to present the major guidelines of the project 'Global Arenas of Knowledge' and its first results. The project involves theoretical work to reformulate the sociology of knowledge in contemporary global perspective, and three empirical studies dealing with key elements of global knowledge production and circulation. The study runs first in three southern-hemisphere countries which are part of the post-colonial periphery or (in world-system terminology) semi-periphery, but which are not part of the impoverished 'third world', and where knowledge institutions are well established: South Africa, Brasil and Australia.  It will then move to linked institutions in the global metropole, in the USA and UK. The empirical work takes three domains of knowledge as starting-points (HIV/ climate change/ gender studies), and examines them in several ways, combining ethnographical work, interviews,documentary work and quantitative methods of citation-context analysis to study the patterns of centrality, inclusion and exclusion of researchers across the global arenas. In this paper, I present the results of the first part of the study, which involves interviews conducted in Brazil with senior researchers in three different domains of knowledge and historical analysis of each domain. I focus on two specific themes that are more closely related to the proposed session: a) how the dynamics center/periphery affects knowledge production in the Brazilian case; b) how Brazilian social scientists in these different domains of knowledge build their careers in a global scale.