The National Anthem sung in the Tikuna language by student Mowatcha and the participation of Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and professors Olgamir Amancia Ferreira and Renato Peixoto Dagnino marked the opening ceremony of the 4th Unicamp Extension and Culture Congress, held on Monday afternoon on Friday (21), in the auditorium of the Convention Center. Organized by the Dean of Extension and Culture (Proec), the congress brings together professionals from across the country to discuss issues related to extension and culture in the university environment. (See full schedule)
The Dean of Extension and Culture, Fernando Coelho, highlighted the importance of the event. “It’s bringing the community to the university and bringing the university to the community. Not just in the sense that the University is the owner of knowledge, but rather that the University needs to know the knowledge that is not its own, but that is fundamental for our knowledge generation process to be influenced by the community that is around us. around”, said the dean.
Coelho says that the holding of the congress – which, this year, has as its theme "Curricularization and Democratization" – It is a moment of reflection. “In order to ask ourselves what university we will have in a little while; from the moment the extension is completely integrated into our curricula”, he says.
“Who are the students we will train? What form will each undergraduate course take, given that it is an activity that requires intense community participation? It's a big challenge. But I'm sure that, in the end, we will have students who, in addition to becoming good doctors, good dentists, good language teachers, will also be citizens who are sensitive to the reality of the country where they live; who will know how to transform this reality in order to make the country less unequal”, added the dean.
The rector of Unicamp, professor Antonio José de Almeida Meirelles, said, at the opening ceremony, that extension activities are a great opportunity for interaction between the university and society. “Extension is the channel through which we strengthen our ties with the community and should be the bridge of contact with social organizations. With the extension, we renew the commitment that the things we research here (at the university) are increasingly in tune with the desires and needs of society”, he added.
For the president of the Forum of Pro-Rectors for the Extension of Public Institutions of Higher Education in Brazil, Hélder Silveira, a truly democratic university is a more open institution. “It is a place where professors work to develop teaching, research and extension in a horizontal way, without thinking that one of these constitutional dimensions is more important than the other”, he said. “A democratic university is a university that is, in fact, open to the population, and the challenge that arises is to know how we can make the university a place for the people, where people feel comfortable”, he added .
What are the limits of science?
Special guest at the Congress, Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos recalled that there is nothing in the world that science can entirely solve. It is necessary, according to him, to discover other models of knowledge.
“What are the limits of Science? The point is that Science only responds to problems that it can formulate scientifically. If we don't formulate a problem scientifically, science doesn't respond. She is not able to understand. For example, you cannot answer what happiness is. Why are we here? Where are we going? Are our ancestors with us here? What is the purpose of life? None of these questions can be answered scientifically”, said the professor, who has a PhD from Yale University and retired professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal.
“And since there is no scientific answer, then it is of no interest to science. And when science is alone, it turns the problems it cannot solve into problems that are not important, refusing to solve them”, he adds. According to him, the concept of happiness contains, for example, domains of spirituality, completely external to science. “I'm not talking about religion, but about spirituality, the dimension of the transcendent, which indigenous peoples and quilombolas know very well, but which we don't”, he says. “The first limit of science has to do with this. The second limit is that scientific thinking is very important for accumulating information and knowledge, but it is very poor in wisdom”, he teaches.
The professor said that, while still young, he carried out his first fieldwork in the Jacarezinho favela, in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for four months. As a way of collecting information, he began to routinely talk to people in the community – a shoemaker, a bar owner, a pai de santo and others –, discovering popular wisdom there. Knowing that, according to him, they didn't go through university courses. “From then on, I learned that my knowledge as a sociologist is important, but that there is other knowledge”, he confessed.
For Professor Boaventura, science has one more limit. “She is very good at technical and scientific knowledge, but very poor at ethics,” he says. According to him, the world is experiencing the 4th Industrial Revolution, but it uses 19th century ethics. “It is ethical irresponsibility in a society that will eventually eliminate 15% of all jobs in the world. In some parts of the world, like Ethiopia, for example, 70% of these positions may end, because the country works mainly for industries in China and Asia. What will happen to the future of this society? That’s not up for debate,” he says. “Today we even discuss the ethical problems of the algorithm, but this type of problem is not discussed,” she adds.
For Boaventura Sousa Santos, science can become a powerful weapon, if it is alongside social struggles and if it knows how to articulate itself with popular knowledge. “Popular knowledge is enriched by science, but science can also be enriched by popular knowledge”, he states.
Cultural Management Forum
Parallel to the 4th Extension and Culture Congress, Unicamp receives also the VI National Meeting of the Institutions Cultural Management Forum Public Higher Education Institutions (Forcult). For Fábio Cerqueira, responsible for organizing the Forum, the change of government at the federal level allows us to see changes in university cultural policy. “After a long time, we held a meeting that is not in a context of resistance. This time, we are in a context of great hope that we will be able to coordinate with the federal government to even create a national university cultural management policy”, he said, to applause.
Read more in the complete codertura of the fourth edition of the Extension and Culture Congress:
