Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Editorial
Article
The purpose of this article is to raise a few arguments and make theoretical contributions to support the pertinence of the link between the so-called critical environmental education and the environmental justice movement due to the approach in how they define the causes of the current crisis, establish social struggle strategies, and defend the anti-capitalistic corporate project. This link is not only timely for the process of overcoming the destructive, alienated social relations of nature, but also underpins a perspective of the political ecology for which the determinations are material and of class. In the three movements - critical environmental education, environmental justice and political ecology - there is an ongoing argumentative process of ideological resignification of the environmental issue, acting as a counterpoint for the hegemonic interpretations of the common sense on the socioenvironmental phenomenon. They all have elements in common that form the amalgamation through which one can critique and, yet, operate politically on behalf of social transformation.
Article
This article addresses the discussion concerning the risks posed by manufactured nanoparticles held during regional meetings in Latin America and the Caribbean by the SAICM (Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management/Enfoque Estratégico para la Gestión de Productos Químicos a Nivel Internacional). It contextualizes this discussion by overviewing the development of nanotechnology in the region and the scientific evidence available on the risks brought about by nanotechnology. It proposes an approach to identify the players that should be involved in the discussion and in risk management based on the nanoparticles' life cycle. The article also proposes a few of the conditions needed to encourage the responsible development of nanotechnology from sectors such as the SAICM, and brings into the discussion the eight relevant items from over a hundred environmental organizations and workers under the supervision of nanotechnologies and nanomaterials.
Article
This article discusses the health and en-vironmental concepts of community health agents (CHAs) working in two riverside communities in the Ilhéus-Itabuna axis, in southern Bahia, Brazil, and their health promotion activities focused on the en-vironment. Semi-structured interviews carried out among 14 CHAs were analyzed using the collective subject discourse technique proposed by Lefèvre and Lefèvre (2005). In their discourses, the CHAs proved to have a broad view of health (quality of life and rights) and related the environment to the territory, although they consider this as the place where people live. They also relate health to environmental improvements, and although they live and work in a territory where there are serious environmental issues, they undertake environment-related activities only occasionally and individually. From this perspective, reorienting the work process, the CHAs show they are able to create new forms of relationship between the environment and health. Leveraging these players, who live on the scene of the tension of the several territories they transit in, valuing their knowledge and their experience of (in) the environment where they live or work, can be the first step taken toward change, with the reorientation of the health practices and of the health care model.
Article
This article investigates the health and environment issue as presented in an educational collection on science for Elementary Education based on the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. The gender and pre-gender concepts were used to research the actional meaning of the text through which three main groups of generic structures were identified: descriptive, explanatory, and narrative. By analyzing these structures, one can find action modes that discipline social identities, social relations, and knowledge and belief systems.
Article
Our study begins with the legacy of the cross-cutting issues left by the National Curriculum Parameters, specifically concerning environment and health, in an attempt to understand how they were processed in official documents - such as the National Curriculum Guidelines, the Curriculum Instructions for Secondary Education, etc. - and how they were absorbed and resignified within the schools, particularly in the political-pedagogical projects. An attempt was made to problematize these topics based on the current moment, never neglecting, however, the context in which they were created. For this new reading, support came from authors working with text analysis and qualitative research. The study of the 'environment' and 'health' portions showed that the texts are largely unattractive; impractical; have difficulties in giving clues for action; do not show the different interfaces with the different areas well; do not facilitate viewing the direction in which trans and interdisciplinarity take place; at times, are insufficient or superficial, and bring a behaviorist proposal for education. Within these limitations, education is more useful for conformity than to actually transform reality; it attributes too much responsibility to the individual and exempts the State from its duties; it fosters passive citizenship, which indeed affords an understanding of one's rights, but does not actually achieve them.
Article
The article is based on reflections coming from research done on the multiple possibilities of 'practical' environmental education, taking, as starting point, a study on ethnobotany that sought to get to know and value popular knowledge about plants in rural districts of the city of Uberlândia, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The survey was conducted among children, youth, and people from the community of the districts of Tapuirama and Cruzeiro of Peixotos and used various media languages. Different methodological approaches were used in the course of the investigation in an attempt to adjust to the reality of each district. The data were collected using various visual media, such as photography and video. These tools were present in the different workshops held over the course of the research project; during the last one, there was the collective production of the documentary titled Causos do Cerrado (Stories of Savannah). The study brought interaction between local (the tradition of the folk knowledge on plants) and global (technological resources employed in media production).
Article
This article presents the view health area professionals and students have concerning the interface between health and the environment. It is a qualitative, descriptive study undertaken with different social players that are part of the vocational training process in the health care area in a municipality in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The data were collected through a semistructured interview comprising gui-ding questions on the study subject and carried out among hospital workers, nurses, health care professors and students, and community health agents. Each subproject was analyzed individually based on the content analysis framework. The results show that the subjects have dichotomous views on the environment and acknowledge the adverse effects of the current environmental crisis, claiming that human beings are the main cause of it. The study subjects understand that there is a narrow interface between health and the environment and that the economically less privileged populations are those most affected by environmental damage. It is concluded that deepening the debate on the subject in the process of providing training and professional practice in health is fundamental in order to seek effective socioenvironmental responsibility among the social players involved in the sector.
Review
Review
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Ensaio
The emergence of the ecological crisis as a clearer symptom of a true civilizatory crisis has imposed new challenges to critical thought and, in particular, to Marxism. Based on this assumption, this article aims to present Michael Löwy's defense of an ecosocialist radicalization of the Marxist critique of modernity, a task for which Walter Benjamin's great refusal of the ideologies of progress is one of the critical sources of inspiration. To Michael Löwy, breaking away from the ideologies of progress and from the modern capitalistic civilizatory paradigm is a prerequisite for the ecosocialist updating of Marxism.
Debate
This article examines the nature and implications of the socalled Local Development (LD). To this end, in view of the also socalled Economic Development (ED), as well as of the structural transformations operated in contemporary capitalism, it converses with themes such as 'productive structures and spaces' and 'State and scalar praxis,' showing the appropriation the liberals have made of them geared to claim a certain perspective - with hegemonic pretensions -, namely the absence of paths for corporate development that could be alternative to LD. The author also argues that the proclaimed modesty of the LD supporters does not stand when submitted to more serious analyses, nor does its also proclaimed progressive nature, since this now resurgent practice, at the end of the day, is one of the faces of today's internationalization of capital. The author also argues that ED affirmed itself historically with the same exegetical and hegemonic pretensions, though from those supporting ED it gets just as much criticism for its virtues as actually for its defects. Finally, the article provocatively asks whether the old developmentalism would be the possible resistance (and not LD), or whether it would be appropriate to re-invoke some truly insurgent alternative (?).
Debate
Based on the workforce overexploitation category, formulated in the context of the Marxist Theory of Dependence, we critique the thesis that Brazil is becoming 'a middle class nation' and state that a substantial contingent of what has been named the 'new middle class' is, in fact, one of workers - and their families - living in overexploitation conditions. The article is divided into three sections. In the first, we questioned the basic assumptions of the 'Brazil, a middle class nation' thesis. In the second, we explain the fundamentals of the overexploitation category and show how it increased in Brazilian capitalism production relations in the 2000s. In the third, we showed how the access the working population has had to consume durable goods in recent times, before the ascent to the supposed 'new middle class,' is a renewed type of overexploitation. Finally, we highlight the links between the Brazilian working class' labor conditions, health, and rights and the trends in world capitalism, questioning the false neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism dilemma in the current debate and putting the real dilemma in terms of the emancipation of the working class against the despotic power of capital.
Debate
This article attempts to discern the theoretical potential inscribed in the contributions of two Brazilian sociologists to the sociology of development between 1950 and 1970: Luiz Costa Pinto and Florestan Fernandes. To this end, the innovative direction of their formulations is analyzed in contrast to the American sociology of modernization, which by then had become hegemonic. Such analysis is done from three views: (a) their conceptions of the sociological practice and of its specificities in a peripheral context; (b) their views on the dynamics of social change in Brazil, as forged in their research on relations between blacks and whites, (c) their theoretical syntheses of the 1960s and 1970s.
Debate
The central purpose of this article is to discuss the main categories of the Marxist Theory of Dependence. This effort is justified because this the-oretical perspective has been being retrieved in recent years. Firstly, there is a discussion on the original meaning of what the theory understands by dependence and, based on that, the specific nature of the integration of economies dependent on world capitalism. Then, in addition to reaffirming the central character of the overexploitation of labor as a specific feature of these economies, it is argued that this is only intelligible when understood as the response of dependent capitalism to different forms of transfer of value to the central economies. In view of the fore-going, the article concludes with notes on the directions that can be taken by a critical recovery of the Marxist theory of dependence.