Unemployment, which concerns all of the Brazilian society nowadays, is the theme of the main dossier on the 85th issue of the Estudos Avançados journal, launched on December 17, 2015.

According to the publication's editor, Alfredo Bosi, "the dossier not only raises crucial questions of economic theory but also objectively analyzes certain situations", with reflections that "affect the structure of Brazilian capitalism at this time of financialization and acute deindustrialization".

However, the dossier does not simply identify the economic difficulties of the country and its impact on the labor market. Bosi points out that most of the texts indicate output paths of the crisis, with not always orthodox measures, firstly recommending the reduction in the rate of interest and then progressivity in taxation on high net worth and unproductive income streams, resumption of infrastructure investment, industrial policies, national exploitation of pre-salt resources, maintaining of internal credits, review of health cuts, education and housing, and income transfer through social security measures.

The collection of texts is also concerned with relevant specific issues such as the role of unions in the dynamics of employment and the labor market for women, young people and blacks, and makes a labor situation comparative study in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Organized by economist Marcio Pochman, president of the Perseus Abramo Foundation and a professor at UNICAMP, the dossier contains 13 articles written by 20 experts linked to the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE) and nine universities: UNESP, UNICAMP, PUC-SP, UFSC, UFF, UFRGS, UFPR, UFSM and PUC-RS.

Issue 85 also features articles on urbanism in Brazil (especially in the city of São Paulo), literary criticism and philosophy, as well as reviews of the books Time, Work and Social Domination, by Moishe Postone, and Escritores, Gatos e Teologia ("Writers, Cats and Theology"), by Waldecy Tenório.

The disruption of a tailings dam in Mariana, in the State of Minas Gerais, on November 5, is the largest environmental disaster ever occurred in Brazil and one of the five largest in world history.

In addition to causing the death of 13 people (there are still eight missing persons), destroying the homes of 250 families in the Mariana subdistricts, and several other social and economic impacts, the mudslide has affected water resources (especially the Doce River, until its mouth in the State of Espírito Santo), and terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

On December 7, at 2 pm, at the seminar The Environmental Damage of Samarco - Impacts and Recovery, five professors of USP, covering various disciplines, will explain the severity of the consequences of the disaster and what needs to be done for the environmental recovery of the affected areas.

The exhibitors and their topics will be:

Ana Paula Fracalanza (EACH and Procam-IEE-USP) - The Impacts on Water Resources

Luis Enrique Sánchez (EP-USP) - The recovery of degraded areas

Marcos Buckeridge (IB-USP) - The Impacts on Ecosystems

Pedro Luiz Cortês (ECA-USP) - The Dynamics of Tragedy

Pedro Jacobi (IEA, FE and Procam-IEE-USP) - The Social Impacts

Moderation will be in charge of Jacobi, who coordinates the IEA's Environment and Society Research Group, organizer of the event.

Photo: Federal Senate

The impact of climate changes in megacities is the subject of the fourth meeting of the cycle Towards COP 21: The Groundwork to Paris – Climate Change, Adaptation, Solutions and Opportunities. The debate will take place on November 19, at 9.30 am, in the IEA Events Room.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

The title of the meeting is Climate change and Megacities: Sustainable Mobility, Public Health and Growth Planning. The panelists will be Luiz Firmino Pereira, Metropolitan Planning Superintendent of the Secretariat of Rio de Janeiro's State Government, and Silvio Barros, Secretary of Planning and General Coordination of Paraná's State Government. Coordination will be in charge of Tomas Alvim and Marisa Moreira Salles, both from the Arquivos do Futuro organization, supporter of the cycle.

Goals

The cycle seeks to identify and discuss opportunities to change patterns of emission of greenhouse gases. Another goal is to make a contribution to the Brazilian government and to the negotiators who will participate in the Conference of Parties on Climate Change Conference (COP 21) to be held in Paris, from November 30 to December 11.

Each debate has one or two coordinators who also act as moderators of a discussion with the panelists. The format aims to prioritize the dialogue between the panelists and the audience (in person or via internet).

Document

The results of the discussions will be consolidated in a document to be delivered to the Brazilian government and presented in side events at COP 21. After the conference in Paris there will be a new event in which the achieved results will be presented in order to suggests actions to be taken by countries, companies and the society.

The organizers of the cycle are: University of São Paulo, the Interdisciplinary Climate Investigation center (INCLINE) and the IEA’s Environment and Society Research Group. The project has the support of the Brazilian Chapter of the World Water Council, the Brazilian Network of the Global Compact (UNGC), Arquivos do Futuro and CPFL Energia. Three USP professors are in charge of the overall organization: Weber Amaral (Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture), Tércio Ambrizzi (Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences) and Pedro Jacobi (IEA, FE and Procam-IEE).

Photo: NASA/Wikipedia

Since the first edition of the forum, Portal Imprensa seeks to revisit the news agenda on AIDS. In the 80s and 90s, the disease was a constant theme in news reporting. One effect of this was the emergence of the habit of often talk about sex, HIV and other everyday matters of youth. This habit, however, seems to have decreased, while records of HIV infection among young people have been increasing.

According to the Ministry of Health research, AIDS cases in Brazil among people aged 15-24 have increased 40% from 2006 to 2015. The survey revealed that 94% of Brazilians know that condoms are the best way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, but almost half of the respondents (45%) did not use condoms during casual sex they had the year before.

At the forum, vloggers Danilo Leonardi and Nelson Sheep will talk about the power of the Internet in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Atila Iamarino will opine on the effectiveness of anti-AIDS campaigns, while Cristine Kist will comment on the role of media in combating HIV. The increase in the number of young people with HIV in Brazil will be handled by Gabriel Estrëla, actor and creator of the project Boa Sorte (Good Luck), Antonio Nardi and Alexandre Santos, both from the Ministry of Health's Secretariat of Health Surveillance.

AIDS in Brazil

Fábio Mesquita, director of the Department of STD, AIDS and Viral Hepatitis, says that "the most vulnerable in this context has been the young. In Brazil, although the AIDS epidemic is stable nationally, the fact that in the last 10 years there is a significant increase in AIDS detection rate among people aged 15-24 (from 9.6 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2004 to 12.7 in 2013) draws attention."

UNAIDS, the UN program on HIV, says that Brazil now faces a major challenge: to raise awareness and mobilize the youth about the importance of HIV prevention and the elimination of discrimination.

According to Eda Tassara, coordinator of the research group, by addressing the presence and representation of home, path and water in the landscape and in the city, the seminar aims to "contribute to the intentional, poetic and shared construction of a more balanced social environment in the future in comparison to nowadays". She explains that the seminar's title is inspired in a statement by French geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1930): "There are three key things to start a human community: home, path and water." She adds that psychologist Omar Ardans, from the Federal University of Santa Maria, by commenting on Brunhes's statement, said that its content "is in no way contradicted by the current state of life on the planet. On the contrary, it is even more modern than at the time of his writing."

However, there is one condition for the establishment of this balance, as Ardans's comment cited by the researcher: "That balance does not exist in (or to) a single individual, in a vacuum. Instead, the spaces of coexistence of this individual, and the participation in community and societal contexts define the particular form of conquered balance (or, at worst, desired).along with the physical environment and objects built by humans."

That's why, he said, "the first word for the proposed reflection should be 'city', privileged form of organization of the man on the grounds that he dwells." In support of this choice, Tassara points out that American urban planner and thinker Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) opened his book "The Culture of Cities" with a statement saying that the city "is the point of maximum concentration of force and culture in a community."

She also recalls that Italian philosopher Rosario Assunto (1915-1994) argued that "the concrete environment, the environment we live in and of which we live, is always the environment as a way of territory: a landscape". It follows that "landscape" is the second word of the seminar, "understood as the way that nature and man gave to the territory as they organized it on the basis of life."

Viewed from these perspectives, landscape and city can be understood as "more-than-spaces" inextricably linked, with the balance of the assembly having crucial importance for human life, but not just for it, according to Tassara. "Both our organic existence as the persistence of the very way of life of our community / society depend on this balance. Recognizing this mobilizes our reflection on the essential aspects of the human-environment relationship that is expressed in the countryside and in the cities."

Photo: Douglas Pfeiffer Cardoso/Flickr

Growth in rates of obesity and overweight among children and adolescents, and the implications of the National School Feeding Programme's Food Guide for the Brazilian Population will be discussed at the seminar Healthy Eating Policy: Proposals and Their Implications in the School Routine, on October 29, from 9 am to 5 pm, in the Auditorium of the USP's Faculty of Education (FE). This is the fifth meeting in a series that addresses the integration of service and research through the CREN-UNIFESP-IEA case stduy.

Municipal and state departments of education have been proposing several initiatives for schools to deal with the healthy eating theme, in accordance with the National Curriculum Parameters. Among other actions, these proposals include curriculum projects, research in the community to learn about eating habits, promotion of food and nutrition education, and practices of purchasing, production and distribution of meals to students at school.

According to the organizers of the seminar, these government initiatives need to be known and analyzed by researchers and other professionals devoted to the proposition of public policies for schools. "The literature of this field," they explain, "has shown that it is not enough to propose policies if there is no dialogue with existing practices at school and with the difficulties of everyday school life for its effective implementation." The seminar proposes to establish this dialogue.

Organization is in charge of the IEA's Nutrition and PovertY research group, the Nutritional Education and Recovery Center (CREN) and UNIFESP, with support by the FE-USP.

The topic of debate will be Climate Change and Food Security: Will We Be Able To Feed 10 Billion People? Marcelo Vieira, from the Brazilian Rural Society, will be the speaker and moderator, and the panelists will be Paulo Faveret, from the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES); Luiz Fernando Amaral, from Rabobank; and Weber Amaral, from USP’s Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture.

The main issues to be discussed are:

• How agriculture will feed 10 billion people
• How to reconcile the production of food, fiber and energy in a sustainable and conscious manner
• The role of agriculture as an important vector for adaptation and for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases
• Agriculture as a key element for generating income and reducing the impacts on urban environments in a scenario of climate change and of economic, political and environmental instability.

THE CYCLE

The cycle Towards COP 21: The Groundwork to Paris – Climate Change, Adaptation, Solutions and Opportunities seeks to identify and discuss opportunities to change patterns of emission of greenhouse gases. Another goal is to make a contribution to the Brazilian government and to the negotiators who will participate in the Conference of Parties on Climate Change Conference (COP 21) to be held in Paris, from November 30 to December 11.

The organizers of the cycle are: University of São Paulo, the Interdisciplinary Climate Investigation center (INCLINE) and IEA’s Research Group Environment and Society. The project has the support of the Brazilian Chapter of the World Water Council, the Brazilian Network of the Global Compact (UNGC), Arquivos do Futuro and CPFL Energia. Three USP professors are in charge of the overall organization: Weber Amaral (Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture), Tércio Ambrizzi (Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences) and Pedro Jacobi (IEA, FE and Procam-IEE).

Cultural policies constitute a development component of any society. In the current context of Latin America, "where the State can no longer what it could," the central question turns to be "which State and which public institutions do we want and do we need, and how to build a modern, integrative cultural policy not to be 'State-centric' ".

This is the opinion of Gerardo Caetano, from the Universidad de La Republica, Uruguay, who will be the speaker of the seminar Las Políticas Culturales como Variable Indispensable del Desarrollo [The Cultural Policies as Indispensable Variables of Development], to take place on September 22, at 2 pm, in the IEA events room. The event is organized by the IEA's research group Fórum Permanente: Cultural System Between Public and Private.

The event will feature three professors of the USP's School of Communications and Arts (ECA): José Teixeira Coelho Netto, Lúcia Maciel Barbosa de Oliveira and Martin Grossmann (director of the IEA and coordinator of the research group).

Citizenship

For the beneficiaries of the programs for emergency and social assistance in Latin American countries to increasingly become the subjects and not the objects of public action, social policies should be drawn centered in the focus of citizenship and in the fostering of an independent organization of the non-organized, according to Caetano.

(Read the reference text in Spanish)

He identifies two risks in this process in the case of culture: to believe that we can make cultural policies without politics and to demagogically choose a populist vision with a simplistic identification, sometimes in a monopolistic way, of popular culture with culture.

Caetano emphasizes that one can not lose sight of the fact that today there is an informal supranationality and transnational public spaces, and that it is impossible to speak of cultural policies without discussing the issue of their economic supports.

Requirements

The professor identifies four aspects to be considered for the construction of Latin cultural policies that are a genuine support for Latin American development:

• the need for many accurate diagnoses in the cultural sphere (in contrast to the view that the region's societies are overdiagnosed and missing proposals);
• the fact that culture is by definition cumulative and that there is no sense in wanting to start over from scratch when drafting public policies;
• to create cultural policies that are active and reformative, but without becoming the populist politics, which does not choose, does not select;
• to put aside the parochial perspectives and choose flexibility and emphasis on issues of knowledge, innovation and professionalisation of cultural management, avoiding the mere copying of imported models.

Image: "Le Muse Inquietanti" (1918), by Giorgio De Chirico

Scheduled for December in Paris, the COP-21 will attempt to reach a new, legally binding universal agreement on climate to limit global warming to less than 2 °C. This would be an unprecedented feat in the 20 years of climate negotiations under the aegis of the United Nations. Every year, the COP brings together the 195 signatory nations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), created during the Rio-92 conference.

“The climate summit in Paris will be a date of no return, a D-Day, a Year 1000,” says Lezama. For him, the expectations regarding the 2015 conference are due to the possibility that its decisions might avoid a disaster of major proportions or an “apocalyptic end for humankind.”

However, as Lezama explained, the agreements and disagreements between nations follow a complex plot: they derive from “the political and economic logic of the relations between countries, the deep articulations and interdependencies between the developed and underdeveloped, between their elites, their poor and the ecosystems that support the socioeconomic and political systems of both worlds.”

An example of what he is referring to happened during the COP-15. Held in Copenhagen, Denmark, the 2009 meeting went down in history for the repression of the demonstrations organized by environmental NGOs and for the inability of Danish leaders to coalesce. At the time, the hosts dreamed of reaching agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted at COP-3.

This is the second event that the IEA holds to discuss the prospects of the Conferences of the Parties. In late 2014, the Institute’s Research Group on Environment and Society organized the seminar “COP-20: What Can We Expect?”, coordinated by Pedro Jacobi.

A trajectory linked to Brazil

Jeffrey Lesser has a proximate relationship to Brazilian history and is an unstopPable follower of life in the country. An example of this involvement is the article he wrote for CNN's website immediately after the demonstrations against the Brazilian government on August 16.

Lesser is currently Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Brazilian Studies, Director of Brazil Initiative and Head of the Department of History at Emory University, in Atlanta.

He obtained his Ph.D. in history at New York University, supervised by Brazilianist Warren Dean (1932-1994), who was a lecturer at the IEA-USP in the late 80s. Lesser became master through the American Civilization Program of Brown University, where he majored in political science.

Lesser has already been a professor at the University of Tel Aviv (Israel), at the USP, at the UNICAMP and at the UFRJ (Brazil), and at the Connecticut College, at the Occidental College and at Brown University (USA).

His most recent book is "Imigração, Etnicidade a Identidade Nacional no Brasil", which will be released still in 2015 by Editora Unesp (the original version in English came out by the Cambridge University Press in 2013).

Historian Jeffrey Lesser, from Emory University, wants to contribute with public health policies that combat infectious diseases through the analysis of historical and epidemiological data. This is how he sums up the research project that he intends to develop as the new visiting professor of the IEA-USP from October 1. Lesser's work will be linked to the Institute's research group on Intercultural Dialogues.

"Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes" will have Lesser and eco-epidemiologist Uriel Kitron as main researchers. Kitron will work from Emory University, of which he is also a professor.

According to Lesser, the project will provide alternative means for understanding and overcoming cultural barriers in health care. "We will use a new integrated approach to the humanities methods (historic analysis), and the natural and social sciences (ecology, epidemiology) to answer questions on immigration, diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and health outcomes," explains the historian.

The diseases chosen for the study are yellow fever, dengue and chikungunya, all three caused by viruses that have mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and Aedes albapictus as vectors. Lesser considers the project particularly important at this time due to the fact that São Paulo expects the arrival of chikungunya in the city this year.

They will research two areas of the city: Luz / Bom Retiro (with 70,000 inhabitants) and Liberdade / Cambuci (with 90,000 inhabitants). According to Lesser, these areas "have historically shown differences in the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases and the response to them."

These regions have been chosen because they are home to Brazilian immigrant and foreign immigrant communities. "In both regions there is an area considered by the general population as 'foreign' and socially upward and another one considered 'Brazilian' and socially stagnant," says Lesser.

In both regions there will be an examination of the ecology of diseases, demographic patterns and health discourses in cases of yellow fever (19th century), dengue (20th century) and chikungunya (21st century). Interdisciplinary methodologies derived from epidemiological ethnography of inhabited areas and approaches based on a system of historical and geographical information will allow to store and analyze geographic data from the past and simulate changes over time.

Politician and environmentalist Marina Silva, affiliated to the party PSB and to Rede Sustentabilidade (Sustainability Network), and candidate for the national presidency in 2010 and in 2014, will be one of the exhibitors at the opening of the course "Dialogues on the Amazon in Contemporaneity: Atelier of Ideas and Proposals". The IEA-USP will host the event on April 14, at 2 pm.

This first class will focus Public Policies, Deforestation and Land Management. Besides Marina, the event will count on other important exhibitors: Neli Aparecida de Mello-Théry, a professor at USP's School of Arts, Science and Humanities (EACH), and coordinator of IEA-USP's Public Policies, Territoriality and Society Research Group, Luiz Carlos Beduschi Filho, a professor at USP's Institute for Energy and Environment (IEE), and member of the group coordinated by Mello-Théry, and João Paulo Capobianco, from the Democracy and Sustainability Institute (IDS).

The main objective of the course is the multidisciplinary training on topics that are relevant to the understanding of the current context of the Amazon. The organizers are IEA-USP's Public Policies, Territoriality and Society Research Group, the IEE and the IDS.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Renato Janine Ribeiro has become the third former member of IEA-USP's Board to take office in the federal government in 2015 after being nominated minister of Education by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff on March 27.

The other two are biochemist Hernan Chaimovich, former deputy director of the Institute who became president of the CNPq in February, and zoologist Carlos Roberto Ferreira Brandão, who was the deputy director of the IEA-USP until last January, when he was chosen by the minister of Culture as president of the Brazilian Institute of Museums (IBRAM).

Janine remains as coordinator of IEA-USP's Research Group The Future Inquires Us and as member of the Institute's Scientific Committee for the Intercontinental Academia, a joint project of the IEA-USP in partnership with the Nagoya University's Institute for Advanced Research.

The new minister

Janine shall take office on April 6. The choice has been praised by representatives of the National Association of Directors of Higher Education Federal Institutions (ANDIFES), of the National Union of Municipal Directors of Education (UNDIME), of the NGO Todos pela Educação (All for Education) and of the National Campaign for the Right to Education.

The decision of the president has also been supported by the global head for Education of the World Bank, Claudia Costin, by sociologist Simon Schwartzman and by USP's deputy president, Vahan Agopyan.

Agopyan said to the news portal G1 that "USP is honored by the nomination of Professor Renato Janine Ribeiro as new minister of Education. We are certain that he will contribute to the improvement of education in our country with his unblemished experience."

Janine has graduated in philosophy from FFLCH, holds a masters degree from the Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and a PhD from FFLCH. He has conducted post-doctoral research at the British Library, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia University. His research is related to Thomas Hobbes, philosophy, democracy, politics, political theory, political philosophy, republicanism, university, Brazil and England.

Two of his nine books are A sociedade contra o Social: O Alto Custo da Vida Pública no Brasil (Society against Social: The High Cost of Public Life in Brazil) (2000) and A Universidade e a Vida Atual — Fellini Não Via Filmes (University and Life Nowadays - Fellini Didn't Watch Movies) (2003). He has organized 18 books, and has written 78 book chapters and 81 articles published in specialized journals. Janine regularly contributes to Brazilian newspapers and journals, such as a weekly contribution to the newspaper Valor Econômico.

Janine has been member of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (1993-1997) and of the Brazilian Society for Advancement of Science (SBPC) (1997-1999), from which he has also been secretary (1999-2001). As director of evaluation at the Higher Education Personnel Training Coordination (CAPES) (2004-2008), Janine has coordinated the triennial reviews of more than 2500 masters and PhD courses in Brazil in 2004 and in 2007.

At USP, besides being a member of the IEA-USP's Board (2011-2014), Janine has been a member of the Ethics Committee (2010-2012), a representative of the full professors in the University Council (2009-2011) and president of USP's International Cooperation Comission (1991- 1994).

Photo: Sandra Codo/IEA-USP

The first meeting of the “Latin American Identities” conference cycle will focus on “The Latin America of Historians,” and will take place on April 15, at 4 pm, at the IEA’s Events Room. The lecturer will be historian Antonio Mitre, from the Department of Political Science of Minas Gerais Federal University (UFMG).

Panelists of the event will be historians Boris Fausto, of the International Situation Analysis Group (Gacint) of USP’s Institute of International Relations (IRI); Gabriela Pellegrino Soares, from USP’s School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences (FFLCH); and Guillermo Palacios, from Colegio de Mexico. The event is coordinated by political scientist Bernard Sorj, a visiting professor at the IEA.

The meetings of the Latin American Identities cycle will take place in the months of April, June, September and November 2015. According to Sorj, the goal of the cycle is not “affirm or deny the validity of the existence of a Latin American identity or of the Latin American dream of a ‘great motherland,’ but rather to understand how the idea of ​​Latin America was – and continues to be – built and disseminated, particularly by artists, intellectuals and social scientists.”

According to him, over the course of a long historical process, Latin America acquired multiple connotations associated with political, cultural and economic projects. Thus, the notion of a Latin American unity has become “part wishful thinking and part reality, partly political will and partly product of ponderous objective and dynamic factors.”

“When generalizations about Latin America emphasize unity, we find that they arise from an unawareness of the continent’s diversity. However, we must also acknowledge that the winds that blow in one country, even if they find different national conditions along the way, also affect with particular force the entire region,” he added.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Photo: UFMG