Sociology according to sociologists in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

This essay reconstructs a historical-cognitive panorama of sociology in contemporary Brazil, revisiting the discipline’s research agenda as it has been practiced and conceived since the 1990s. To address the problem in a multidimensional way, we explore a range of primary materials: state-of-the-art reviews commissioned by national scientific associations, surveys, and the analysis of academic memoirs written by sociologists of different generations and from different regions of the country. After a brief review of the main ways of telling the history of sociology in Brazil, we analyze these three empirical subsets, which offer a map of the questions, disputes, shifts, and challenges that structure the sociology practiced in Brazil today, and we argue that the concern with durable social inequalities constitutes its most constant and creative feature.