Scarlett Rocha, Project Director at Mercado Filmes.
Building an academic identity, prestige and recognition in the field of science requires decades of hard work, sophisticated and qualified intellectual production and a broad international presence in the most diverse arenas of scientific debate. In addition, the demands of intellectual production are always a minefield of challenges when it comes to reconciling teaching and research activities, as well as the constant pressure of postgraduate programs to maintain their high level, especially in the field of intellectual production.
The dissemination of science, as well as the construction of intellectual reputation, has always taken place in the context of scientific events, universities, bibliographies of the most diverse types of intellectual production, as well as books, articles and conferences in the different academic circuits. Inclusion in these spaces defined intellectual potential and visibility for a mainly academic audience. In the humanities and social sciences, what brought people together around a name was, in fact, the quality of debate and ideas about the world, society, social groups and the most diverse social, cultural and political interactions and manifestations, among other areas of knowledge. This world includes diverse theoretical perspectives, not least because the theoretical choices are also political.
Different types of knowledge orbited outside the academic spaces, such as that produced by social movements, popular education practices, the most diverse ethnic, religious, economic and popular groups that approached the universities, mainly through university extension, or even through affirmation policies generated or demanded by these various social groups.
These encounters between academia and the real world have provided great learning, broken down walls, created dialogues and polyphonies. Social movements, in particular, went to universities in search of qualifications, just as academics learned strategies of organization and advocacy within their walls. Immersed in all this, the culture of hatred between social groups has spread, placing in these spaces strong confrontations, interests other than scientific ones, while imposing new agendas, most of them incompatible with the requirements of production and academic experience that have always defined the qualification of programs, research centers, project coordinators and science organizations such as research groups and scientific structures.
These issues were extrapolated to social networks and everything became a reason for demands, discontent, accusations articulated among activists, often without evidence and based on narratives quickly disseminated among their members, in local, national and international lists, destroying reputations, in a persecution in many cases unprecedented and very difficult to face.
On social media, the alleged accusations do not need proof and quickly become "truths". There is no adversarial process or right to defense. Surveillance is intense and any action, speech or even any type of movement is quickly discredited, leading to cancellations and immobility for the sake of self-defense. Few resist the alleged denunciations of some radical groups that often do not represent the agenda of struggle of the various social movements, acting in defense of individual interests or small groups.
In this scenario is Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose name has been involved for a year in complaints of harassment by a group of feminists in Portugal, with international articulation. In addition, one of the main "activists", a journalist for a right-wing newspaper in Portugal, has repeatedly published in her weekly column alleged analyses of alleged crimes committed by this intellectual, consolidating a narrative that is difficult to refute.
Faced with this situation, Boaventura first asked for a leave of absence from the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra, of which he is director emeritus and which he created in the seventies. It then called for steps to be taken to establish an Independent Commission to investigate complaints at this important Research Centre about cases of harassment attributed to it. And after a few months, this Independent Commission, after listening to researchers, both new (temporary researchers) and old (permanent project coordinators), concluded that "although men have remained longer in the management bodies, most of these positions have been occupied by women". This reality may explain why of the 14 people reported, nine are women, without giving any names. However, the group that sought to criminalize Boaventura did not accept the report's findings and published a "letter of allegation" criminalizing only Boaventura and supplanting the findings of the Independent Commission's report, due to the strength they have in disseminating this alleged letter of allegation.
After more than a year, in which Boaventura remained silent waiting for the case to be clarified and closed, as he believed that it would be enough to demonstrate the fragility of the accusations and for his life to resume, which did not happen, Boaventura filed a solid, fully documented action before the Public Ministry of Portugal against this prolonged persecution. After this act, Portugal's radical feminists are silent and now everyone is waiting for the investigations of the Portuguese justice system, with no more room for baseless narratives.
All this analysis and story aims to show how vulnerable our academic life has become. We are the object of alleged accusations by anyone, regardless of whether we are really "guilty" or "innocent". These complaints are usually made on social media, on networks to which we do not belong, and when we find out, in most cases the damage has already been done to our personal or even institutional image.
At the same time that young people seek graduate programs, even knowing their responsibilities, they accuse programs and supervisors of the demands of production and compliance with deadlines. The same happens with researchers from research centers who work on a project basis. Therefore, I can affirm that the strategies of vindication of social movements have definitively made their way into the academic world, although often with important distortions that are articulated and seek the achievement of personal interests, to the detriment of collective aspirations.
An example of this is the case of an epistemological dispute between two master's students in a doctoral program: a young white gay man and a young black woman. In this dispute, the young black woman insists on criminalizing her gay colleague for the crime of racism because he, based on Judith Butler's theory, has pointed out inconsistencies in the theory of three black intellectuals. In this confrontation in class the young woman went to the extreme, showing all her anger at this situation, which had a somewhat minor reaction, but which created a traumatic situation for both the teacher and the class, even the student of the master's degree involved the Program with a very distorted and controversial post on her social networks. In this way, we see more and more that it is not even necessary for the published narratives to be true, it is enough that they have a good number of followers and a load of indignation about the accumulated life story itself.
How can we deal with this? We are going to have to find out because every day social networks strengthen more and more the narratives of the dissatisfied, of those who, being "skinned" as Zeca Baleiro said, cannot stand the contradiction, see the facts through lenses that superlativize the facts and make dialogue and the paths of respect and reasonable coexistence impossible.
In this way, the various problems of relationship and alleged violence within an institution are immediately reproduced on social networks in a distorted and articulated way, and without the necessary time for institutional research, which should be the first instance. In this way, they launch themselves into social networks without any treatment or investigation, acting as watchdogs of issues that have more to do with individual interests or small groups than with the broader demands of social movements.
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