Outreach & Engaged Scholarship
Brazil
The population of the state of Bahia in Northeast Brazil is majority African descent (80%). Bahia, and particularly Itaparica Island in the Bay of All Saints – the site of this Duke Engage program – is rich in Afro-Brazilian history and cultural practices. Yet many of the communities that are the caretakers of this history and culture suffer from a severe lack of infrastructure, security, adequate schools and employment opportunities. In Vera Cruz, a municipality of 44,000 residents on Itaparica Island, school drop out and unemployment rates are high. The Bantu institute, located in a community of several hundred families in Vera Cruz, offers Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, academic tutoring, and employment skills training to youth ages 6-19. The mission of the Institute is to empower youth to take pride in their heritage and to raise consciousness about racial and social injustice in Brazil. Tutoring and job skill training amplify this mission by helping youth stay in school and gain employment so as to improve living conditions for themselves and their families, and help uplift the community. Along with assisting with classes provided by local volunteers (music, movement, English, and computers), Duke students will work closely with the Institute’s director to develop and implement other educational and community outreach initiatives. Students will also have the opportunity to learn alongside the youth in the capoeira, percussion and other Afro-Brazilian cultural classes. Weekly reflection sessions with the Institute’s director will guide students to link their new experiences with larger questions and strategies for combatting inequity and working for social change. Planned activities and short trips throughout the summer will introduce students to some of the rich Afro-Brazilian history, religion, music and dance in Bahia.
Community Partnership(s)
The Bantu Project is an international NGO that operates in Brazil, Australia and the Philippines. The Project was founded in 2006 by Edielson Miranda (Mestre Roxinho) while he was living in Australia and working to help heal trauma among young African refugees. In 2020, Mestre Roxinho returned to his hometown of Vera Cruz, Brazil, to serve his own community. Since its opening, the Bantu Institute has expanded its after-school classes to include capoeira, percussion, circus skills, computing, videography, English and mathematics for youth ages 6-19. It is also developing adult outreach programs—such as a women’s jewelry making collective—to help generate income for families in the community.
Students will be involved in various Bantu Institute projects, which could include the following:
Aiding local volunteers with classes (especially English)
Working in the community garden
Helping to serve meals at the Institute
Developing and offering new afterschool activities
Helping in community projects that could include basic home renovation and painting.
Brazil
Primary Theme: Education & Human Development
Brazil in the early 21st century faces challenges of great magnitude, and the expanded system of federal universities is expected to play a fundamental role in confronting them. The hopeful vision of a better future, with development and social justice, draws sustenance from a successful process of democratization since 1985, important economic advances and the positive impact of redistributive public policies. Yet existing pessimism and frustrations are more than justified by the persistence of social and racial inequalities, inefficient administration and concerns about environmental sustainability. Moreover, Brazil is passing through an accelerated demographic transition. The future of the country, to a great extent, depends on the degree of access to and quality of education. Since 2001, Brazil has engaged in a vast expansion of its higher education system, with the stated goals of promoting economic mobility and reducing social disparities. Enrollments in Brazilian universities have more than doubled, from 3.0 million to 7.8 million students, yet the broader effects of these policies are poorly understood. Existing analyses of Brazilian higher education policies are entirely associational and descriptive in their methodology, and there is still no consensus about the extent to which policies actually contribute, in a causal sense, to social mobility or to the reduction of poverty and inequalities. Both the potential and obstacles ahead are particularly acute in the region known as the Baixada Fluminense on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. With four million inhabitants, the Baixada has one of the highest concentrations of young people in Brazil. It is routinely stigmatized both socially and racially. The county of Novo Iguaçu in the Baixada region is home to 829,000 people and is the location of the Multidisciplinary Institute of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (IM/UFRRJ), the first-ever investment by the central government to address the demand for tuition-free higher education in the Baixada as part of the inclusionary policies of center-left presidential administrations since 2002. The IM/UFRRJ occupies three new buildings, has an energetic and recently hired faculty and enrolls 3,500 students in ten areas of study. The demand for higher education—and the scope of the challenge in delivering it—can be seen in looking at the census estimates for the seven counties closest to the IM/UFRRJ with 353,653 young people between the ages of 18 and 25. Given the 2016 objectives established by the National Plan of Education, 116,705 of these young people should have access to a university education, with 40% of the slots to be generated at the new public universities like the IM/UFFRJ, which at present reaches only 1% of the local population of the age group defined as the primary target for university education. This Bass Connections project began in 2016-2017, in collaboration with faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at the IM/UFRRJ.
Brazil