Introduction
Commenting on the construction of this book is to discuss a technical production. According to the latest CAPES classification (Hemerly et al., 2019), an editorial product results from “processes of editing and publishing works of fiction and non-fiction. It includes planning and executing, intellectually and graphically, books, encyclopedias, preparing texts, illustrations, layout, etc., linked to the Program (projects, lines, students/alumni)” (p. 41). In general terms, this is what we did; by this definition, we are well-framed.
That said, it is necessary to declare that producing this book was a way of freeing ourselves from some shackles. However, we are still tied to another, not by choice but by an institutional framework that we can qualify, at least, as questionable. We will return to this particular institutional shackle later.
Commercial publishers were the first shackles we freed ourselves from when constructing this book. In an analog world, where books needed to be printed and distributed for their content to be accessed, publishers played a relevant role. Maintaining the necessary structure for a book to go from someone’s mind to the reader was expensive, and most people who wanted to publish something could not afford the necessary resources. If that is true, on the other hand, the decision about what the public should read was concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and what dictated this decision was the possible commercial return of a work. There was, therefore, an oligopoly overthought.
This same logic applies to any other form of expression that depended on analog means and structures to be created and distributed: music, films, news, etc. However, today, we live in a world where the production and transmission of information occur digitally. So, just as one no longer needs a soundboard to record or a vinyl record to materialize a phonogram, print on paper is dispensable (which does not mean it has no value). It is also no longer necessary to have a truck transporting tons of books back and forth for people to access them.
In this sense, books in digital formats significantly reduce publication costs. This expands the possibilities for public university publishers, considering the financing difficulties these institutions have faced with successive budget strangulations due to the imposition of neoliberal “austerity” policies. Austerity withdraws resources from workers and directs them into the hands of rentiers who profit absurdly from the public debt driven by high, absurd, and inexplicable interest rates.
Despite this liberation, this story, which is not yet over, does not seem to have a happy unfolding. Capitalism is like the Borg: it always finds a way to adapt and insists that resistance is futile. In the new world of the internet, big tech companies have replaced the oligopoly of analog production and distribution by publishers, record labels, radios, and TVs through streaming platforms, whether video, audio, or even books. Okay, we can create and distribute books, music, and news without intermediaries, but only those linked to the most well-known broadcasting platforms will have a chance to appear and stand out, with rare exceptions.
Despite this setback, the initial premise—that it is possible to create and distribute without intermediaries—is valid, can be explored, and that’s what we did. In this context, this book was built with the free and open-source software called Quarto, which is agnostic. That is, it is not tied to a specific platform. In our case, R and RStudio were used to mediate our relationship with the documents and other files we created. Moreover, all the code used for the production of the book is publicly available on GitHub.
In this new form of digital organization, we are also free from the linearity imposed by the analog medium. When we used a cassette tape, to get to the song we wanted to hear, we had to fast-forward the tape to where it was. If we watched a TV program and needed to go to the bathroom for a few moments, we would miss that crucial moment in the series when the plot was revealed. Today, we can even pause a live TV broadcast and return later.
Thus, we had a series of printed words and illustrations in a book, and we would go from page to page as we wished. People with visual impairments needed a Braille version to access the material autonomously. In digital versions, the book doesn’t need only words or illustrations, nor does it have a concrete form. In this sense, regarding visual impairment, screen readers are common and increasingly accurate, which, as long as the material is organized appropriately, allows it to be accessed by blind or low-vision people. Even figures, if they are audio-described (and in our case, they are), can be “read.”
In this context, any of the chapters of this book can be accessed with a click, and there is a search tool to find terms or concepts you wish to retrieve. Since we don’t need to have only words, we can, for example, place videos wherever we want and blocks for people to execute R codes. Here are some examples of how the possibility of bringing together various media in one space was used in this production:
The chapter “Clinic, Aesthetics, and Politics of Care: The Experience of Permanent Health Education in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic” discusses the experience of a course aimed at health professionals from various municipalities in Ceará, whose videos are available on YouTube. Whoever reads this chapter will be able to watch the course videos directly within the book, as they are interspersed with the words, paragraphs, and topics of the text.
In “Podcasts on Psychology, Human Rights, and Contemporary Socio-Psychological Processes: Experiences of VIESES-UFC During the Pandemic”, some of the episodes of the presented podcasts are available in the margin of the book.
The statistical analyses of the chapter “Work and mental health of teachers in the interior of Ceará during the COVID-19 pandemic: conclusive technical research report” were performed using the R programming language mentioned earlier. Thus, considering the integration that Quarto enables, all the code used for data analysis is available to readers, which follows a trend of promoting open and reproducible science.
Still on R, in the chapter “Report on the course “Introduction to R for data analysis in Psychology”: proposal and construction,” it is possible to run R codes within the book itself. The chapter presents some examples of topics that the course covers and the reader can try to execute some exercises on them.
These are examples of what is possible, and as researchers better understand these possibilities of intersection, much more can be articulated. There is a universe of creativity to be explored.
The third shackle does not depend only on technological means to free ourselves from it. It depends on a political struggle to rethink scientific production in Brazil, especially the forms of evaluation of graduate programs, the granting of scholarships, and funding for researchers. From more than one sensible voice, we have heard that Einstein would never have had a project approved in Brazil. Over the years, a neoliberal managerial logic has taken hold of Brazilian education at all levels and seems to have taken root in evaluation mechanisms.
The formula is very similar to the financialization that has taken over companies: only the quarterly profit matters for dividend distribution and increasing managers’ bonuses. Immediate profitability must come at any cost, even if it means making cuts that will eliminate possibilities for innovation and, in the long run, render the company incapable of competing in the market.
In graduate studies, what we see is: publish massively, even if they are absolutely irrelevant products, but that earn points in miraculously elaborated evaluation tables. The more you do this, the more access to resources and “prestige in the field” you will have to perhaps someday do what you truly believe needs to be done.
Obviously, we are not saying that all production is irrelevant; countless innovations and discoveries emerge amid this perverse logic, but the caricature shows the path this model leads us to follow. That said, in the long run, it is necessary to denounce that this model of results in scoring tables applied to graduate studies can make scientific production voluminous but without any impact, whether in basic science, where one simply wants to understand how the universe works, or in the attempt to solve the numerous problems the country faces.
This model already has byproducts: the commerce of participation in edited books, whose advertisement claims to be “adherent to Qualis CAPES,” and, perhaps ethically even more questionable, the sale of co-authorship in chapters. If the game is to score points, what’s the problem with selling points to those who want or need them? The logic is simple: paid, published, and scored.
And what do we do? We invented a lovely name to avoid going to the root of the problem: they are “predatory” publishers and journals. We’ll make endless little lists to put them on our academic bonfire of vanities, proclaim to the four winds that these practices need to be combated, and continue avoiding the discussion that really matters, which is asking ourselves why the evaluation has this solely quantitative character based on scores with questionable criteria. There are “qualitative” elements in the evaluation forms, but, at the end of the day, it’s the volume of “well-scored” production that counts, and the competition between programs is at the base of the evaluation system.
In this sense, we will not criticize the people who organize and make money from this commerce, even if the practice is morally questionable (tell us something in capitalism that isn’t?), nor the people who participate in it, because they are not the cause of the problem but the most obvious consequence of the model we are questioning. We will not criticize, but we must ask ourselves: does anyone believe in the relevance of most of the “knowledge” generated in this academic fruit fair? This fair arises from the managerial model that needs to create scoring tables to say who is more or who is less in this ranking done every four years concerning graduate programs.
A small addendum to show how this spreads throughout Brazilian education. Something similar happens in basic education when looking at large-scale assessments, a U.S. proposal that has already proven misguided there but is still treated with deference here due to the enormous influence that private foundations linked to large corporate groups have on educational policies. Several municipalities display advertisements showing the scores that the municipalities and schools obtained on the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB). Political opponents will accuse managers of fraud to get the scores, but in many cases, there is no fraud in the sense they are accusing.
The fraud lies in treating education as training children to solve Portuguese and mathematics tests, the only subjects evaluated. What occurs is what is called curricular narrowing (Gesqui, 2015; Rubio & Mendes, 2020), in which all other subjects are relegated to the background. There are cases where history, geography, and any other subject teachers are pressured to teach the topics that will be asked in external assessments and abandon their contents. If we think about it, even Portuguese and mathematics are sidelined because they, in themselves, do not matter, but rather the children’s ability to solve the tests. Critical thinking, citizenship, scientific education—for what? What I need is to advertise how high the municipality’s score was.
Translating this statement to graduate studies: cutting-edge scientific production, solving the country’s problems, making discoveries about the universe—for what? What I need is to score, score, and score to reach the Olympus of grade 7. In both cases, what positive has this brought to society? No one cares because what is at stake is the quarterly result to distribute dividends to shareholders and giving bonuses to managers. In this logic, the long term is for those who like to philosophize and not to make money or score points.
Here is another addendum: are we going to criticize those who play the game that is set? Never! People are trying to survive in this jungle of competition that this evaluation model has created and are workers with precarious working conditions who, amid all this, try to do something relevant for the world. We can invite them to reflect and engage in the struggle for better working conditions, which involves a profound change in how scientific production is evaluated in Brazil. Did you think we would abandon this game because there is no way? You thought wrong…! The first thing capitalism condemns us to is fatalism, and we will not surrender to it.
As we said before, we deliberately caricatured the path of scientific irrelevance to which this model leads. Still, we recognize the struggle of teachers and researchers to produce high-level knowledge in a country that treats science and technology as something subordinate. If we make the denunciation here, it is not against the workers but against the capitalist system that intertwined its financial logic in the management and evaluation of graduate studies and proclaims the end of history as if nothing else were possible beyond the deepening of this perverse model.
The content of the chapters is the sole responsibility of the authors. The opinions and positions adopted do not necessarily reflect the views of PPGPSI, PPGPPPP, or the editors.