Life In Brazil Research Articles

Autobiographical narratives of race and racism in Brazil: Critical Race Theory and language education

This research reflects the experiences of language teachers regarding race and racism in their lives in Brazil. The three main research objectives were to examine how these teachers personally encountered racism; what these teachers’ narratives reveal about racism and the way that they reflect about their own racial identities; and finally, how the experiences of these teachers were transformed into action in their language classrooms and in their private lives. The theoretical framework used was based on Critical Race Theory (CRT), which was the basis for data analysis (LADSON-BILLINGS, 1998, LADSON-BILLINGS AND TATE, 1995). The methodology for data gathering was autobiographical narratives about these teachers’ experiences of race and racism. The results showed that in one way or other these teachers faced issues of race and racism in their own homes, in schools as students, in university as students, as well as in their own working environments.

Simplified method of plantigrafia for assessing the feet of diabetic patients

Background The complications in the feet of diabetic patients are an important cause of morbidity and generate high economic cost to health systems. This includes high rates of amputations and hospitalizations and leads to reduction of work capacity of people still of working age. This also alters the quality of life of these patients. The wounds on the feet reach approximately 15% of patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) throughout life in Brazil. High plantar pressure is a proven risk factor for ulceration among individuals with DM. The photopodoscopia is one of the tools used in screening for high plantar pressure among these subjects. However, an examination photopodoscopy is not accurately demonstrates the high pressure area and there is no specific computer program to analyze the image plant.

Evaluating slum (favela) resettlements: The case of the Serra do Mar Project, São Paulo, Brazil

Slum clearance and resettlement schemes have increasingly become a feature of everyday life in Brazil and the rest of the world. The right to decent housing can involve relocating slum families to places that not only fulfill the precepts of adequate housing but also enhance the self-respect and quality of life of these families. Resettlement can however also heighten their vulnerabilities. This article is the result of a study which sought to evaluate how the resettled residents of a housing complex had adapted to their new surroundings following their involuntary displacement from the slums “favelas” to a development with characteristics different from those commonly found in Brazilian social housing. The research method employed in our study used tools to collect the viewpoints of the different actors in the process, and to assess user satisfaction. The uncertainty measure was used to analyze the quantitative data. The results showed that (i) involuntary removal is not a determining factor in user satisfaction, and (ii) residents' satisfaction levels are more influenced by a number of positive factors, especially the location of the housing development and its associated services, facilities and opportunities that enhance their quality of life, than by any drawbacks arising from their forced removal from the “favelas”. However, issues such as condominium management, buildings maintenance and higher costs may risk undermining the benefits of the project.

"Mentor in Bioeconomics avant la lettre": A tribute to Bernard Witholt by those who worked with him.

Bernard Witholt was appointed a professor of biochemistry at the University of Groningen at the age of 30 years. He was born in 1941 in The Hague (the Netherlands), spent his early life in Brazil and moved to the USA during his teenage years. After studying biology at Amherst College (Massachusetts), he undertook a PhD at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Before returning to the Netherlands, he did his post-doc and became a staff member at the Department of Biology and Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego.

Gota úrica visceral em coruja suindara (Tyto alba) de vida livre

A gota úrica é uma doença metabólica caracterizada pela deposição de cristais de urato e ácido úrico em tecidos do corpo, que pode acometer répteis, mamíferos e aves. Neste trabalho, relata-se um caso de achados post mortem compatíveis com gota úrica visceral em um exemplar de coruja suindara (Tyto alba) de vida livre. Macroscopicamente, o pericárdio apresentava-se completamente esbranquiçado, espesso e aderido ao miocárdio e o fígado e ambos os rins apresentavam áreas esbranquiçados sugerindo acúmulo de urato. A microscopia do tecido cardíaco e hepático revelou pericardite fibrinosa e perihepatite necrosante respectivamente. Congestão pulmonar e infiltrado inflamatório heterofílico multifocal no parênquima renal também foram visualizados. As alterações encontradas são compatíveis com as descritas na literatura para gota úrica visceral em aves, podendo até serem consideradas como lesões patognomônicas. Este é o primeiro relato de gota úrica visceral em um rapinante de vida livre no Brasil.

Factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life in Brazil: a systematic review.

ABSTRACTOBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life in Brazil.METHODS Systematic review of epidemiological studies conducted in Brazil with exclusive breastfeeding as outcome. Medline and LILACS databases were used. After the selection of articles, a hierarchical theoretical model was proposed according to the proximity of the variable to the outcome.RESULTS Of the 67 articles identified, we selected 20 cross-sectional studies and seven cohort studies, conducted between 1998 and 2010, comprising 77,866 children. We identified 36 factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding, being more often associated the distal factors: place of residence, maternal age and education, and the proximal factors: maternal labor, age of the child, use of a pacifier, and financing of primary health care.CONCLUSIONS The theoretical model developed may contribute to future research, and factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding may subsidize public policies on health and nutrition.

It Is Almost as If There Were a Written Script: Child Murder, Concealment of Birth, and the Unmarried Mother in Western Australia

It Is Almost as If There Were a Written Script: Child Murder, Concealment of Birth, and the Unmarried Mother in Western Australia

Narrativas da diáspora feminina contemporânea: uma leitura de Algum lugar, de Paloma Vidal

Paloma Vidal, in her first novel, Algum lugar (2009), presents a "writing of the self" that enables a stroll around some major modern metropolises while we travel along the pages of a young student and teacher’s diary. Her text, marked by references to canonical works and authors, is based on reminiscences that turn the work into an attempt to find and identify oneself with spaces, people and other texts, in the past and present. Moreover, the Argentine writer, who lives in Brazil since her childhood, discusses in her novel the deterritorialization condition of the migrant, who, by living in another country, faces the loneliness and the consequences of diaspora. This article aims at building a reflection on such topic, which occupies a central place in the current scene, caused by the globalization of culture that appears in literary works such as Paloma Vidal’s. The analyzes are supported by references derived mainly from Cultural Studies, such as Edward Said (2003), Zygmunt Bauman (1998, 2001) and Stuart Hall (2003).

A Percepção do Sujeito que Matou por Amor

This study seeks to collaborate in understanding crimes of passion by investigating the perceptions of individuals who committed such crime. Violence against women ends thousands of lives in Brazil and worldwide. The study made use of a qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive method and interviewed four inmates convicted of murder motivated by passion. During the interviews, card 13 of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was shown with the aim of stimulating the subjects to talk about how they perceive their life story. With the interviewees’ consent, the interviews were recorded and later transcribed. Data were grouped into thematic categories for analysis and interpretation. Results showed that according to the subjects the main reasons for their crimes was the need to control women, issues related to their families of origin, betrayal, self-perception, guilt, fear of abandonment, and prospects for the future .

Tools used for evaluation of Brazilian children's quality of life.

OBJECTIVE:To review the available tools to evaluate children's quality of life validated for Brazilian language and culture.DATA SOURCES: Search of scientific articles in Medline, Lilacs and SciELO databases using the combination of descriptors "quality of life", "child" and "questionnaires" in Portuguese and English.DATA SYNTHESIS: Among the tools designed to assess children's quality of life validated for the Brazilian language and culture, the Auto questionnaire Qualité de Vie Enfant Imagé (AUQEI), the Child Health Questionnaire - Parent Form 50 (CHQ-PF50), the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL(tm)) version 4.0 and the Kidscreen-52 are highlighted. Some tools do not include all range of ages and some lack domains that are currently considered relevant in the context of childhood, such as bullying. Moreover, due to the cultural diversity of Brazil, it may be necessary to adapt some instruments or to validate other tools. CONCLUSIONS: There are validated instruments to evaluate children's quality of life in Brazil. However, the validation or the adaptation of other international tools have to be considered in order to overcome current deficiencies.

“The Energy of Others”: Narratives of Envy and Purification among Former Grassroots Community Leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil

This article examines the appearance of religious metaphors and imagery— related to the evil eye, envy, energy, and purifi cation—in the narratives of former lead- ers from Porto Alegre's internationally renowned initiative in direct democracy, the Participatory Budget. The data come from qualitative interviews conducted with female grassroots community leaders who for various reasons have withdrawn from active civic participation. While notions of envy and evil eye are commonplace in everyday life in Brazil, their appearance in discourse around citizen participation appears out of place. This article uses four ethnographic cases to examine how notions of envy and evil eye are drawn upon to explain discontinued civic participation. I argue that the apparent anachronism of religious imagery such as envy and evil eye refl ects a widespread as- sumption among activists, politicians, and scholars that civic participation initiatives like the Participatory Budget are inherently secular. I also advance the broader argu- ment that bringing scholarly attention to nonpolitical metaphors and tropes that shape grassroots political experience leads to a more complete account of citizenship practices and identities in Porto Alegre.

Brazil’s Immigrant Song

Brazil’s Immigrant Song

Health-related quality of life in Brazil: normative data for the SF-36 in a general population sample in the south of the country

The objective of this study was to provide normative SF-36 scores in a general population sample in Brazil and to describe differences in mean scores according to socio-demographic characteristics. The SF-36 questionnaire was distributed to a randomly selected sample of the general population of Porto Alegre in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The response rate was 68% and 755 subjects were included (38% male, 62% female). Lower health status was revealed among females in the 30 to 44 year age bracket, from the lower income class, with less education and self-reported chronic medical conditions. The results and percentiles of scores of the SF-36 are reported as normative data for the general population. The SF-36 was an acceptable and practical instrument for measuring health-related quality of life in a sample of Brazilians. The results of this study can be useful for researchers using the SF-36 questionnaire in other groups to compare the scores with normative data. The SF-36 may prove a valuable tool for discovering vulnerable groups in epidemiological studies due to the ability to discriminate between different population subgroups.

Essays on the history of brazilian dipterology: III. Three remarkable notices from the 18th century, mainly related to myiasis-producing flies (Cochliomyia and Dermatobia)

This paper registers reports about dipterans made by three Portuguese who lived in Brazil during the 18th century. Luiz Gomes Ferreira, in his book Erario mineral [Mineral revenue], wrote curious passages related with myiasis-causing flies of the genus Cochliomyia. Jose Rodrigues de Mello registered, in Latin verses, the folklore for curing myiases caused by Cochliomyia hominivorax in cattle. Luiz dos Santos Vilhena, in the last of his twenty letters dealing with several aspects of life in Brazil, made reference to horseflies, human bot flies and mosquitos.

PUBLISHING STATISTICAL DATA ON THE WEB

Statistical data is one of the most important sources of information, relevant for large numbers of stakeholders in the governmental, scientific and business domains alike. In this article, we overview how statistical data can be managed on the Web. With OLAP2DataCube and CSV2DataCube we present two complementary approaches on how to extract and publish statistical data. We also discuss the linking, repair and the visualization of statistical data. As a comprehensive use case, we report on the extraction and publishing on the Web of statistical data describing 10 years of life in Brazil.

Beyond Discontent:

Beyond Discontent:

Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop (review)

Reviewed by: Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop Melissa Castillo-Garsow Derek Pardue , Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 224 pp. Derek Pardue is a cultural anthropologist and the foremost US scholar on Brazilian hip hop, having already contributed a number of articles on the topics of race, educational practices, and marginal ideologies in relation to hip hop. As the only English-language book-length study on the topic, Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop provides an important contribution to a slow but growing body of scholarship on hip hop's globalization. This is especially significant in Brazil's case, as Brazil has a vibrant yet understudied hip hop scene. Pardue focuses on various elements of hip hop (MCing, DJing, break dancing, graffiti writing) to demonstrate how Brazilian participants represent their reality in response to daily social, economic, and locational marginalization. According to Pardue, these self-constructions through hip hop provide both an empowering space for practitioners as well as a way to deconstruct and reconstruct societal notions of race, gender, and favela life in Brazil. [End Page 769] Pardue's primary research came from four years of residence in São Paulo, Brazil between 1995 and 2002, as well as various two-month research stays during which he interviewed dozens of rappers, DJs, b-boys, b-girls, and graffiti artists. Although Pardue did speak to a growing number of hip hop icons and celebrities in Brazil, his focus is mainly the independent artists residing in the favelas, their everyday lives, and how they use hip hop in an attempt to comment on or change their lives and Brazilian society as a whole. His focus on São Paulo favela residents omits the existence and impact of a completely divergent scene in Rio de Janeiro, where highly commercialized baile funk competes with more socially conscious messages. Within this ethnographical approach, Pardue's discussion of what specific conceptual aspects of hip hop in São Paulo are particularly "Brazilian" are approached through several theoretical and methodological frames, which he outlines in the introduction. Specifically, he frames Brazilian Hip Hop as an "alternative system" of cultural production and identity formation for marginalized populations. More than just a musical form of expression, Pardue conceives of hip hop in Brazil as an ideology of social consciousness, truth-telling, and transformation. He contends that hip hoppers in Brazil use the idea of periferia (their periphery location and social standing) as a primary source of information and social consciousness and as a way to inspire transformação (transformation) in both their communities and individual lives. The periferia, then, is both a place and an ideology, simultaneously signifying marginality and empowerment for the favela resident engaging in hip hop culture. While the numerous interviews and variety of practitioners that he came into contact with is significant, his ethnographic approach engages with very little lyrical analysis, which would have further illuminated this idea of transformação. While Pardue presents what the hip hoppers say about their involvement, he provides very little of what they actually produce, for example, in terms of written lyrics for rappers, or artwork for graffiti writers. Pardue incorporates a brief but important history of hip hop's development in Brazil within the context of the country's socioeconomic disparities, the military dictatorship, the black consciousness movement and the emergence of a música black. He also contextualizes the emergence of hip hop within traditions of community organizing and bureaucratic negotiation, which is a significant and distinct aspect of its development in Brazil as numerous posses (or hip hop crews) have been able to gain funding and spaces from state agencies and NGOs to pursue creative production. [End Page 770] Pardue analyzes the way hip hop negotiates constructions of race and gender, by emphasizing two strands of Brazilian hip hop as key to understanding Brazil's unique hip hop scene and ideology: what he calls "marginal style,"which describes daily conditions of poverty and discrimination, and "Hip Hop positivism" which tries to find solutions to problems in the favelas through a more historical and global perspective. In terms of racial discourses, he finds that despite an early...

Families, Gender Relations and Social Change in Brazil: Practices, Discourse, Policy

We discuss three different areas in which policies on gender and the family have been debated and formulated in Brazil, revealing both the forces of change and the many contradictions that are at work within this society today. After a brief look at the historical vicissitudes of families and family life in Brazil, as representations and as forms of social organization, we come to our more immediate context: the re-democratization processes that engulfed Brazilian society as of the 1980s and the social actors generated therein. Issues relating to gender and sexuality become increasingly visible on the broad political agenda that, notwithstanding national specificities, also converges with social, political and cultural trends emerging all over the world in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The three specific issues we discuss here—the Maria da Penha Law on domestic violence, efforts regarding the legalization of abortion and recent debates that have emerged around a bill introduced to give legal status to same-sex relationships—provide testimony of a society characterized by tensions between mechanisms sustaining restrictive definitions of family, linked to male dominance, heterosexism and hierarchical gender roles, and those that push toward more egalitarian, diverse and democratic family relations.

Conversation with Raul Caetano

In this occasional series we record the views and personal experience of people who have especially contributed to the evolution of ideas in the Journal's field of interest. Raul Caetano qualified in medicine in Brazil. While retaining close academic and cultural links with his native country, he has developed a career as an alcohol epidemiologist with research positions first in Berkeley,California and then at the University of Texas. He has contributed very widely to epidemiological research on drinking but with a sustained ability to develop the important ethnic dimensions of such studies.

Controle judicial das políticas públicas

We have seen the Judiciary, currently an active role in the institutional life of Brazil. However, this judicial activism, sometimes applauded, sometimes criticized, should be viewed with caution. In fact, the action of the Judiciary, though sometimes necessary, cannot invade the field of action of other Powers, otherwise undermine democracy and represent the legalization of politics, as warned Carl Schmitt. Thus, the merit of public politics, referent the competence of the government, must stay out of court control. The object of this study will thus establish the limits of judicial review in relation to public politics.