O subcampo CTS na Educação em Ciências e suas compreensões acerca do conceito de participação: uma análise bibliométrica e bourdieusiana

Abstract

Despite the great expansion of research on STS Education in recent decades, is still significant the absence of definitions regarding its objectives and assumptions. This absence is manifested in the idea of participation, which is recurrently used, however, apparently automatically and without explicit foundations, as an echo of broader social discourses that also resonate in this field. Based on Pierre Bourdieu's theoreticalmethodological perspectives and Bibliometric Analysis combined with Social Network Analysis (SNA), this work seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main understandings about the concept of participation in the national context of STS Education? How is it historically structured as scientific capital within this research subfield? What are the central agents in this structuring process? What are the possible articulation potentials between the STS subfield and Participation Studies? The definition of the corpus of analysis was based on searches in national journals linked to Research in Science Education (RSE) and in all editions of the National Meeting of Research in Science Education (NMRSE), finding a total of 445 articles related to the theme of participation. The research contemplated the descriptive approach of the corpus, the complete analysis of the bibliographic references, the SNA from the citations made and the elaboration of the Strength Diagrams, with the aim to represent the social space that comprises part of the STS subfield. Of the total number of articles, 222 were classified as non-incidental, in which readings and qualitative analyzes were performed. This fraction of the corpus was initially categorized according to levels of participation, considering microsocial, macrosocial and diffuse participation. At the same time, were cataloged the authors or schools of thought used as foundations when mobilizing the concept of participation. The constructed results indicate the existence of a core of centrality, composed of authors who concentrate an expressive monopoly of specific capitals, representing the fraction with the greatest dominance and distortion of the subfield's own logic, consequently, significantly influencing its structuring. From the SNA and the metrics used, it was also identified networks established with extremely low densities, that is, with few established ties, gravitating around the centrality core. All this panorama indicates that the subfield of STS Education is structured from a strong monopoly of few central agents and presents few lines of dialogue with other social fields of knowledge production. This framework limits and weakens its proposals, making it watertight, closed in its own internal dialogues, disregarding the established power relations and the real possibilities of participation in central issues involving Science and Technology themes. At the same time, it reinforces the initial hypothesis of the present research, namely, that STS Education in Brazil has few foundations and dialogues with areas that take the concept of participation as their own object of analysis. We hope that the analyzes proposed here encourage a more careful look at the theme, in search of bolder ideals around popular participation, necessarily thought from the objective relationships that determine it in a very specific way in our country.