Construção político-institucional do campo da Saúde Coletiva na Universidade Federal do Ceará

Abstract

Collective Health is considered a field of knowledge, practices and political activism with multiple insertions. There are peculiarities in the structuring of this field in each region of the country, so this work aims to analyze Collective Health field political-institutional construction at Federal University of Ceará (UFC), considering the specific social, cultural, academic, financial and of that state. To this end, a descriptive-interpretative research, with a qualitative approach, was developed. 24 open, non-directive interviews were conducted with key actors of constituting public health process in Ceará. 12 interviews that were transcribed as an attachment to a dissertation on the same subject were also included. Documentary research was also carried out based on the official records of this historical process, as well as the biographies, event records and news related to the investigation proposed here. Some materials were provided by the interviewees to the researcher. The interviews took place from January 2019 to January 2020. The search for documentary information took place from September 2018 to March 2020. All the material of interviews, productions and documents was analyzed, having as theoretical-methodological reference the notions of scientific field by Pierre Bourdieu. All ethical principles of research with human beings have been followed. It was observed that the UFC has a previous history of training in Public Health, which goes back to the preventive philosophy of the 1940s/50s, when parasitologists from Ceará had the opportunity of a scholarship and founded the Institute of Preventive Medicine (IMEP) of UFC. It was a space for training, research and practice linked to the community with very advanced ideas about curricular organization at that time and which greatly contributed to the structuring of a field of studies in Preventive/Social/Community Medicine in the state. IMEP was dissolved during the military dictatorship, however, the remaining professors and students of the institute maintained, even with difficulties, some research and extension activities at the university. Institutionally, IMEP is considered a precursor to the UFC Community Health Department and, about the importance of these facts, some events that led the actual university training bodies in Public Health since this movement of parasitologists were described. And the sanitary and political conjuncture of some periods that lead the political-institutional construction of the field of Collective Health in the UFC were analyzed. Based on the collective health training process at UFC, when structuring a postgraduate program in the area, the historical process and the production of dissertations and theses in Ceará were analyzed, showing the profile of each institution, as well as the organization of disciplinary training at UFC, with a predominance of the epidemiology subfield. From Bourdieu, it was possible to identify many disputes and nuances of entry in this field.