O diploma e as “novas ruralidades performadas”: trajetórias formativas, mobilidade social e reconfigurações territoriais em Araquém – CE

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the social, economic, and symbolic effects of higher education graduation among young people and adults from rural areas who represent the first generation in their families to access university education. The research takes as its empirical locus the district of Araquém, located in the municipality of Coreaú, in northwestern Ceará, and investigates how higher education is converted into new forms of professional insertion, social recognition, and the construction of life projects, producing transformations that go beyond individual trajectories and impact the territorial and symbolic configuration of the rural space.Based on na ethnobiographical and long term approach, following educational trajectories for more than a decade, the study articulates life narratives in order to understand the meanings attributed to the diploma by subjects from farming families marked by experiences of child labor, economic precariousness, and difficulties in their schooling processes. The research dialogues with Brazilian rural sociology, studies on social mobility, and the sociology of education. As its main analytical contribution, the thesis proposes the category of “performed new ruralities,” constructed through dialogue with the notion of the “new rural” and with interactionist anthropology. This category makes it possible to understand that transformations in rural áreas are not limited to economic diversification or the expansion of services, but also involve identity performances, narratives of social ascent, and forms of self-presentation that resignify the social position of subjects, redefine collective expectations, and produce new grammars of belonging. Graduates thus become mediators between tradition and change, articulating territorial permanence, professionalization, and pluriactivity. By highlighting higher education as a vector for the reconfiguration of ruralities, the research demonstrates that the permanence of graduates in their territory does not represent immobility, but rather an active process of reinventing the rural as a “space of life.” The thesis contributes to sociological debate by showing how educational policies, individual trajectories, and territorial structures intertwine in the production of inequalities, as well as in the concrete possibilities for social mobility and symbolic transformation in the contemporary rural world.