The translation of the chemistry's course: a dead or alive science?

Abstract

The Scientific knowledge is built in scientific communities and, in Brazil, it is concentrated in the universities. Within this environment, different relations permeate, cross and fold their subjects, subjectivated by assemblages and discursive and normalizing practices. Analyzing how such communities form and expand their territories means, at the same time, observing how they remain alive. One of the strategies that allows us to observe this is to follow the Scientific Facts that circulate and oxygenate such communities. Going through the chemistry field leads us to analyze classrooms, chemical and research laboratories, students and teachers, human and non-human actors. Our research was carried out through the discourse analysis of interviews conducted with university teachers of the Chemistry course. Therefore, what we found was a “black box” full of tangled mechanisms that would guarantee its success. In this sense, the use of the Actor-Network Theory helps us to understand these flows and thus diagnose an alive or dead science, which will be able to be ascertained only by opening such a box.