Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reflections on a different worldview

• Main Authors: Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais 2021-02-01
• Series: Estudos Internacionais
• Subjects: Oriente Médio; Pedagogia; História Árabe
• Online Access: http://seer.pucminas.br/index.php/estudosinternacionais/article/view/24189

This paper describes and analyses the experiences of two Brazilian professors in teaching History and International Relations of the Middle East and the Arab World, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. Essentially, this paper is an exercise of comparison between the limits faced – but also the possibilities found – by the authors in the development of their activities as Latin American professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World in Brazil. Its main aim is to help scholars involved with these subject-matters to reflect on their pedagogical practices and on the knowledge they are promoting (or inhibiting) with their research proposals and teaching procedures. Anchored in the methodological techniques of participant observation and critical curriculum analysis, this paper reaches the conclusion that the socialisation of Brazilian scholars in the Anglo-Saxon literature on the Middle East when not mediated by a critical posture towards these parochial knowledges that pretend to be global, can make them more reproducers of the discourses produced in the North about the region than thinkers of the Global South capable of offering their educatees a space of knowledge production that is meaningful to them as Brazilian students.