A Política cultural da UFAL e a estruturação do campo das políticas públicas de cultura no Brasil

Abstract

The university is an important institution in the process of producing and disseminating knowledge and culture, that has become an important space for the development of cultural policies. Brazilian federal universities are increasingly mobilizing to formalize specific cultural policies. The Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL) is one of the institutions that has recently undergone this process. Considering that discussing the relationship between university, culture and cultural policy is essential for university institutions, this research aimed to analyse the process of formalizing UFAL's Cultural Policy and its relationship with the structuring of the field of public cultural policies in Brazil. To this end, the theoretical lens of institutionalism was adopted, as it provides a broad understanding of institutions and brings a series of important constructs to consider when analyzing the choices involved in the process of formulating public policies. Documentary research and a questionnaire were applied to civil servants who were members of the committee responsible for formalizing UFAL's Cultural Policy, and analysed using the Bardin-based Content Analysis method. They confirmed the assumptions that there is a relationship between the formulation of UFAL's Cultural Policy and the structuring of the field of public cultural policies in Brazil and that isomorphic pressures from the field of public cultural policies in Brazil influenced the process of formalizing UFAL's Cultural Policy. It was also identified that the university in Brazil is characterized as an institution that has acted as a pole of resistance to authoritarian governments and that institutionalized factors in the field of public cultural policies have served as an obstacle to the institutional dismantling of culture promoted by the Bolsonaro government and have enabled the advancement of institutions with less interference from party politics, such as universities, in the elaboration of public policies and in the formation of professional networks, such as FORCULT.