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There are many writings by political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians about populism, many chronicles in the media, most of the time to rebuke this type of discourse. It goes so far as to ask whether there is still something new to be said. However, yes, there is still something to be said, if you want to analyze this phenomenon without a priori judgments, without denouncing it at all costs, and try to understand it through an analysis, which will be a discourse analysis. It is the role of the researcher to try to explain before condemning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following study seeks to understand how the Facebook page of the City Council of Itapevi, Brazil, made political literacy possible through political education, discussions on the political agenda, and mobilization in its communication on the social network. The corpus of the analysis brings together 683 publications made in 2019, a period in which the page showed an increase in audience compared to the previous year (2018). The quantitative research, though with a qualitative look, identified posts that made political knowledge possible to the citizen, as well as interviews to understand the use of the social network by the institution. An appropriate analysis to understand the use of the network by the public body, since the latest survey by DataSenado shows that 74% of Brazilians have or have had a social network - Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, or Twitter. A significant number, especially when compared to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), from 2019, indicates that two-thirds of the country's population (69.8%) have an internet connection. These numbers drive the research of communicologists and political scientists, who seek to understand how this communication network is being part of people's daily lives. Mainly taking into account that the internet, and especially social networks, are becoming a space where different people connect, share content and participate in the political debate a few clicks away. The internet's expansion in Brazil and the number of people connected to networks made different public bodies create profiles on social networks to interact with people. A new channel that aims to establish a rapprochement with this digital audience, ensure transparency in management and encourage the participation of everyone in the decision-making process. As occurred at the City Council of Itapevi (CMI, in Portuguese). However, to guarantee a minimum of success in this digital endeavor, the information available on the networks must be of public interest and its content must be accessible, allowing citizens to understand how public authorities work and to know the process of choosing representatives. A knowledge that can be shared with the citizen through political literacy, as highlighted by Cosson (2016: 51): "these are knowledge related to the functioning of the State, with an emphasis on democratic mechanisms, which involves, on one hand, a knowledge about elections, parties and institutions, and on the other hand, the rights and duties of the citizen". Therefore, the article was divided into four parts, in addition to the final considerations. The first seeks to clarify the difference between public and political communication; the second addresses how Facebook has supported CMI's communication strategy. Furthermore, there is a literature review on political literacy. Finally, the objective of this study: an analysis of the possibility of political literacy through publications made on the CMI profile on Facebook, in 2019, which concludes that the page is a virtual space for debate and public expression in the city, with growth potential for the promotion of citizenship and political knowledge. The study is based on publications in the areas of public communication (Matos, 2000; Marques, 2011; Correia, Ferreira y Santo, 2010), social networks (Recuero, 2010; Ferrari, 2010, Silva, 2017), and political literacy (Cosson, 2020; Biesta, Lawly e Kelly 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text examines the tensions and the dissonances in the relation between religion and public sphere in contemporary Brazil. Based on a Sociology and on an Anthropology of the phenomena of secularization and secularity, the purpose is to demonstrate the "porosity" of the Brazilian public/political system with the religious milieu. By applying a socio-historical perspective, the work attempts to understand how the boundaries between religion and politics were precariously constructed throughout the constitution of our State in Brazil, without ever having been institutionally well-delimited. This vacuum, which generated concessions on the part of the State to major Christian religions, guaranteed public legitimacy to their religious symbols in official state spaces, which are, in principle, neutral and secular. However, the 1988 Constitution represented the influx of modern and secular legislation that legitimized subjects of rights such as women, black people, indigenous peoples, LGBTs, environmentalists, etc. Given that background, this reflection aims at contributing to the interpretation of the complexity involved in the multiple and contradictory presence -- in the public sphere -- of both major Christian religions -- which are based on an agenda of conservative religious values -- and liberal and libertarian projects organized by segments of civil society and public agents, which generate tensions and dissonances. To understand this reality -- as a mosaic of interactions and antagonisms --, we work with the notion of "pluri-confessionality" of Mexican sociologist Roberto Blancarte and also with the notions of secularity of "recognition" and of "integration" of French political scientist Philippe Portier. Hence, we attempt to reach theoretically and empirically a broader and nuanced understanding of our public-political system in the relation with the religious dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the debate about education that took place in the early twentieth century in Brazil and provided a productive discussion on the role of education in society. On one side was the Catholic Church that supported religious teaching in public schools and on the other side, educators who were close to Progressive Education and advocated secularism. We point out the main theses that guided this dispute and emphasize the differences between these two groups. We also present a brief history of the separation between the State and the Catholic Church after the proclamation of the Republic and elucidate the rearticulation of this institution by highlighting the contradictions between the Church and the educators in favor of Progressive Education. We understand that the issue of secularism was an important factor in this process and that it contributed to the sharp differences between the Church and the supporters of a secular state. In the field of knowledge, historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers and religious studies scholars have been addressing this topic and produced studies, analyses and considerations both in favor and against the introduction of religious education in Brazilian public schools. This article is the result of a bibliographic research that took into account scientific articles, books, dissertations and theses on the proposed topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this article is to reconstruct the history of academic autonomization process of the Political Science discipline in Rio Grande do Sul, since the foundation of its first Graduate Program until the present, through the descriptive analysis of documents and interviews with essential actors of this process. On this basis, we sustain the argument that there was a generation of political scientists at Ufrgs who has contributed in a significant way to the academic autonomy of the discipline at the regional and national level, and, at the same time, was responsible for the local diffusion of the paradigms prevailing in North American and European Political Science. In order to demonstrate the relative adherence to each paradigm, the theses and dissertations defended in the period from 1977 to 2016 are analyzed, based on theoretical and methodological categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims on issuing the definition, the social function and the intellectuals' historic study possibility. To get at the main goal will be used distinct theoretical-methodological perspectives as the contributions done by the historian Jean-François Sirinelli, the considerations from the engagé philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the sociological notes from the political scientist Norberto Bobbio about the intellectuals' theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the ideas of the German political scientist Harald Müller concerning the use of Habermas' theory of communicative action to analyze international political relations. It raises the main problems of this proposal and discusses the possibilities of examining these relations against the framework of the communicative process without borrowing concepts from the habermasian theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]