Geography, (dis)interest and (un)knowledge in ultra right periods

Abstract

Geography was institutionalized in the second half of the 19th century, in Germany and France, as an empirical-analytical science. Between 1950 and 1970 it was constituted as a historical-hermeneutic science and, later, as a critical science. In Brazil, geographic knowledge has gone through different historical periods marked by the ultra-right. In view of this, we seek to question to what extent, with the return to ultraconservatism after the 2015 coup d'état in Brazil, the emancipatory interest that guides actions in the area of ​​academic and school Geography suffers from a political disinterest to the detriment of the technical and linked to your knowledge? In this context, the objective is to analyze the relationship between interest and knowledge of geographic science in periods of conservatism and anti-democracy. This is a bibliographic research, considering the periodization of positivist, functionalist and critical-Marxist schools of geographical thought. It focuses on the approximations between the role of school Geography and the development of the academic field of Geography. As a result, the first two schools of thought show a political appropriation of spatial knowledge through technical interests for the construction of national identity, patriotic ideology and developmentalism, in the context of dictatorial ultra-right governments. It is concluded, however, that with the democratically elected far-right government in 2018, there is a lack of interest in academic geographic knowledge, that is, of the national territory, and a deficit in the critical perspective of teaching in schools through the BNCC's indulging way.