Características do processo de expansão e integração de uma universidade comunitária : o caso da UCS/RS.

Abstract

This thesis is the product of a research that aimed to analyze the process of territorial expansion of the University of Caxias do Sul through its regional integration strategies and involvement with practices directed to the development of the Northeast region of Rio Grande do Sul, in the period of 1967 to 1993. The characteristics of the Institution of Superior Education (ISE) were investigated, in front of the main institutional traces, the regional integration strategies were analyzed in their territorial expansion in this region, and the attributed significances evaluated by the academic and external communities regarding its process of regionalization. The research report, constructed around the interpretative analysis, proposed to verify in an embracing way how the social knowledge in determined groups is produced, and how this knowledge manifests itself in this groups relations. The readings of documental texts, combined with the testimonies of agents involved in its elaboration contextualize this production. Under the moscovician Theory of Social Representations, fundament was looked for to comprehend and explicit the produced meanings, which concepts and modalities of apprehension of real are sedimented in a discipline that poses itself as a limit field between Psychology and Sociology. The University and its expansion movements reveal themselves as objects of representation through their importance and the possibility that the knowledge produced be recognized as social construction and produce consequences in the means under which it circulates. In that sense, the socially constructed practice of the University was always a collective representation, starting from a group of idealizers that, through the union of disperse faculties in the 60’s, are considered constituting elements of the materialization of the University of Caxias do Sul. Emphasis is given to its communitarian character, which still needs to be propagated according to the founding values of the communitarian universities, because that is a frail construction in the social imagination. Regarding the regionalization process, the used territory was a socially shared space, while talking about its appropriation (under a more symbolic sense) and its dominance (under a more concrete, political-economic focus).