Sustainable Development?

Following up on the contacts with the folk at the Center for Sustainable Development here at UnB has been harder than I would have liked, mostly due to health issues that forced two meetings to be postponed. I won’t make any claims about these two professors themselves, but in general, people here are freaking out far more than is justified or necessary about H1N1. I blame corporate media, which still profits from hysteria.

Still, I will be looking into the possibility of applying for the program here this year, but now I feel far less excited than last week when I was first invited (indeed, encouraged!) to enroll at the program. Several factors to be noted here. First, most people in the program, not surprisingly, adopt the discourse of development full force, and more critical approaches to it are seldom considered (see, for example, Arturo Escobar’s excellent book “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World” and also Gustavo Esteva’s essay on development in “The Development Dictionary,” ed. W. Sachs).

Second, the chances of obtaining funding are rather slim for my first year of doctoral work, so even though the University is public – and therefore free – I would still need a job to cover my own living expenses, or I would need to continue dependent on my family for even longer. Staying in Brasília, moreover, would make it harder for me to justify additional expenses when I could continue to live at my parents’ house (as many young Brazilians still do in such situations) or my grandmother’s apartment; and neither option seems too exciting for me.

Third, over the weekend I went out with my cousin Graziela (a cardiologist doing her residency in São Paulo, but visiting her family and partner for the weekend) and didn’t really have much fun at all… The “scene” here is ridiculously bourgie, preppy in the worst way, and quite limited. The thought of spending the second half of my 20’s here in Brasília is nowhere near as exciting as being in some place cool within the US, such as Chapel Hill or Berkeley… Sad but true, most of my young adult life has been down north and so my habits, comforts and desires as all quite “amerikanized.”

Fourth, everything is just plain old messy around here… Certain Portuguese words defy translation, being so endogenous to our culture: “desleixo” is a kind of attitude of “it is not worth it” to actually do things properly, and there is the “jeitinho” where “a little way” is always found around the protocols, rules and regulations, and all of this to the point of utter chaos, confusion, and “bagunça,” the messiness I am talking about. Returning to live and work in Brazil, I must inevitably deal with all of this, but there is still a big different in dealing with this as a “mere” graduate student, who is far more dependent on other people and institutions, and dealing with this afterwards when I can have more control and autonomy over my own activities.

Still, I am also getting in touch with professors and researchers in other programs and other institutions. Next week I’m going to Porto Alegre – the city that developed Participatory Budgeting! – where I will be meeting with three or four professors in the program of Rural Development at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Oddly enough, their team seems somewhat conservative in their focus on “small farmers” instead of “peasantry” and on more natural science-y issues instead of agrarian reform.

Hopefully, I will also get to visit some agrarian reform settlements and cooperatives there, which are some of the oldest won by the MST (in the state, after all, where the Movement first organized itself) and also considered to be some of the most functional and successful. However, it has been difficult to get into contact with people from the Movement here in Brasília. The contacts I do have are all postponed until my return from the South. (This difficulty has been part of my frustration, added to that described above.)

In September and October, I am also looking to visit some folk at the Federal University at Viçosa, Minas Gerais, going through there on a road trip with my parents on our way to Búzios to present that paper at our national Bioethics conference. From there I’ll go to the nearby Federal Fluminense (UFF) and Federal Rural (UFRRJ) Universities, but probably on my own since my parents need to return to Brasília to work. From there, I’ll bus over to São Paulo, where there is a kick-ass Geography program (at USP, probably one of the programs I am the most excited about here in Brazil) and where I get to visit Graziela and another cousin of second-degree, Alexandra. Then bus back over to Campinas (inland São Paulo) to visit another second-degree cousin, Mariana, as well as the university there and some folk from our Green Party and a lawyer who works with the MST.

Exciting times ahead, but right now I am wondering whether I can sustain my OWN development in this search for possible academic programs who could host me during my doctoral research. In the end, I am feeling more like I am doing this to get to know these schools and researchers as possible partners for my work while enrolled at a school in the US. I will be taking the month of October to complete some high quality applications to programs down north, since I need to have them done by mid November, when I leave for Peru and Bolivia and don’t come back until Christmas time. By then, all application rounds for programs here in Brazil will already be over, so I will continue to try work here in Brazil into the first half of 2010 while waiting to see if I get accepted and funded in the United States. Failing that, I’ll then have much more to go on when actually making an effort to apply to programs here in Brazil, and if I do get accepted and funded there, then I’ll have the knowledge and contacts necessary to carry on my dissertation research here in Brazil even while based on the US.