Da autonomia à resistência democrática: movimento estudantil, ensino superior e a sociedade em Sergipe, 1950-1985

Abstract

This thesis about the students’ movement, higher education and society in the State of Sergipe, Brazil, from 1950 to 1985, aims at understanding how part of the intellectuals, professionals, artists and politicians who have obtained their university degrees in the state of Sergipe began to renovate and/or reproduce the dispute for local political power. Discussions about those experiences, which were analysed through written and oral sources, led the approach of two different but interrelated historical periods. For this reason, the present thesis is divided into two parts. The first one, "Autonomy and participation in times of nationalism and reforms", which covers the period between 1950 and 1964, focuses on how students organized themselves to ensure their political autonomy, and also on their struggle, along with the Catholic Church and other segments of society to create a university in the state. The second part, "From the illusory transitional to the democratic resistance", focuses on the period between the civil-military coup, in 1964, and the period of re-democratization, in 1985. It emphasizes students’ experiences in the scenario of intervention, control and surveillance that was established by the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, which imposed restrictions to the guarantee of the state of rights and to society’s exercise of democratic freedom, consequentely, to students and their representative entities (unions). Around those two axes, this thesis presents, initially, how historiography has been approaching the performance of those students inside and outside the major urban centers, based on discussions of notions of class, youth, intelligentsia, intellectuals, civil society and hegemony, among other categories. This analysis tends to reveal peculiarities and interrelations with studies already conducted, without getting limited to the classic first four years after the 1964 coup or to closed, uniform and invariable interpretations, even less to the view that is exclusively centered on the economic and political sense of social process, to which students are usually related. Instead, it seeks to understand the context and time frames in which this movement and its participants lived their social, cultural and political experiences.