Vocational program of Oswaldo Cruz Foundation: The role of emotions

• In Event: Hope for Communities in the Margins: Life-Long Learning

Proposal

The Scientific Vocation Program of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation is coordinated by a multidisciplinary team of professionals, where students from diverse schools in Rio de Janeiro are supervised by researchers in scientific initiation activities in areas of Biological Sciences, Health, Humanities or Social Sciences. This study researched the role of emotions in the formative vocational education of young people who belong to the most disadvantaged strata of Brazilian society considering economic, social, and cultural capitals valued in educational institutions. Previous studies showed that the importance of the advisors is twofold: they teach how to perform the scientific activities and insert students in networks and scientific opportunities.
This research is based on the approaches of Bakhtinian Analysis (Bakhtin, 1997), Anthropology of Emotions (Le Breton, 2017), and Sociology of Emotions (Kleres, 2010). We chose Provoc-Fiocruz students living and studying in the districts of Maré and Manguinhos because these districts were subjected to housing policy interventions aimed at promoting the urbanization of these areas.
The Bakhtinian Analysis approach allowed us to consider the senses of a statement, and words as a semiotic phenomenon linked to human behavior, humans who have the autonomy to resignify these words. Bakhtinian Analysis also helped achieve our research objectives because it allowed for understanding the contexts that may show possible intentions and senses attributed by the research subjects to their relations with the scientific initiation activities, forms of orienting, and relating to each other.
In this study, emotions are considered as mediated by collective norms that guide the behaviors that each person expresses, according to their appropriation of socially constructed values, customs, and knowledge. These different ways of expressing emotions identified by Le Breton (2017) can be found in the symbolic systems: language and body symbolism.
This research is based on semi-structured interviews to identify the use of signs such as voice intonation, gaze, and other body gestures that are important to contextualize the meanings of the words in a statement more accurately. Only three students at Provoc-Fiocruz, who study and/or live in the Manguinhos and Maré neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, and three advisors and two co-advisors from Fiocruz were willing to participate in this research.
The outcomes suggest that the advisors, co-advisors and students believe that scientific training has provided opportunities for young students to enter a more specialized academic and professional training. This may provide more stability and alternatives for entering the job market in the future. From this perspective, these interviewees also value the possibility of the program providing them with symbolic and material resources that are important for realizing their life projects related to academic and professional qualifications that require spatial mobility.
We identified feelings of authenticity such as liking and interest. Moreover, in the narratives of these interviewees, the emotions related to scientific activities are friendship, dissatisfaction, appreciation, and interest. These emotions seem to mobilize sociability bringing together affinities and attenuating inequalities.

Author

• Bruna Navarone Santos, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Oswaldo Cruz Institute