THE PROGRAM

The Postgraduate Program in World Political Economy was approved by the Committee of the Interdisciplinary Area of CAPES in November 2017. The pedagogical project of the PPG-EPM aims to train professionals for the public and private sectors, able to understand and face the great challenges of world development in the 21st century from a historical, regionally situated and systemic perspective.

The academic team is formed from the very interdisciplinary structure of UFABC and the research networks of its members. The group brings to its object of study a diversity of academic trajectories that strengthens the search for an innovative intellectual dynamic in the field of Political Economy.

It is understood that the advance of interdisciplinarity, in addition to the existing structure, requires a proactive pedagogical and epistemological strategy to ensure that the production of knowledge accounts for both the specificity and universality of the developmental trajectories of the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, which, like Brazil, still face great challenges.

It is also understood that one of the most important legacies of Political Economy - the area of concentration of the program - is the recognition that the analysis of social life, whether in the Northern or Southern hemispheres, cannot avoid to at the whole, making the ethical, historical, economic, political, social, cultural, demographic and ecological dimension inseparable.

In this sense, the academic team contributes to a process of renewal and updating the Political Economy and it is added to an accumulation of initiatives in a global scale that has resulted in the foundation of several courses, academic associations and scientific journals of Political Economy since the last decades of the twentieth century.

CONCENTRATION AREA

Political Economy is the field of thought that is at the origin of Applied Social and Human Sciences. In advance of the disciplinary fragmentation of the twentieth century, it is also an important starting point for the interdisciplinary study of the major challenges of world development in the 21st century. Its most important legacies are, first, the recognition that the analysis of social life presupposes a look at the whole, making the ethical, historical, economic, political, social, cultural, demographic and ecological dimensions inseparable; and second, that the transformation of social life presupposes analysis of the materiality of world historical processes and of modern demands for development.

It is understood as a Political Economy the field of thought that was effectively launched in the eighteenth century, seeking to understand the sources of wealth, its relation to nature and work, and its distribution among sectors and classes of society. It is born in the initial phase of the transition from agrarian to industrial society, which, in turn, unleashes a new world dynamics, not only economic, but also social, political, demographic, ecological and cultural. Its driving force is the transformation of work organization into economic centers by the mechanization of production and the construction of a new division of labor between centers and their peripheries. In addition, it inaugurates a new relation between industry, agriculture and natural resources, for demanding the specialization of activities and their reintegration under the industrial impulse.

The field of Political Economy evolved throughout the twentieth century, along with successive stages of globalization, although in competition with tendencies of disciplinary fragmentation. He lived a revival in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the academies of the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, in the process of decolonization and development, where the study of the center-periphery relationship and the problems of world development were prioritized. In this way, the issue of development has become a legitimate focus of Political Economy, which today is seen as a multifaceted problem, both industrial, agrarian, food, energy, ecological, social, political, demographic and cultural, and in addition, subject to new global systemic dynamics. Currently, the areas of research in Political Economy are diverse, but stand out research related to the food, energy and climate crisis and the challenges of technological innovation, industrialization, and job creation consistent with demographic expansion, as well as the epistemological dynamics , political and cultural, including gender and race, that mark contemporary societies. These are precisely the areas that contribute to the definition of PPG-EPM research lines.

At the turn of the 21st century, the field of Political Economy has been regaining space through the founding of academic associations in all continents, the proliferation of national and international scientific journals and the construction of postgraduate courses. In the diagnosis of the PPG-EPM teaching group, it is necessary that the field of Political Economy continue to be updated as an interdisciplinary strategy capable of responding to the great challenges of world development in the new century by overcoming both the juxtaposition of disciplines and the risk of producing such a theoretical fragmentation that makes the dialogue and accumulation necessary for the process of knowledge production difficult.

In the same diagnosis, the teaching group understands that innovation in Political Economy requires institutional efforts to bring its research agenda closer to the concrete challenges of developing countries in general and of Brazil in particular. Such an approach requires, in addition to the interdisciplinary approach, the valorization of the systemic vision, so that the world development and the trajectories of the South are conceived as an integral part of a single world system. It also calls for the systematic study of the southern regions and their traditions of thought on development.