THE POSITION-TAKING OF THE RESEARCHER-SUBJECT IN MASTER’S DISSERTATIONS IN RELATION TO THE BNCC DISCOURSE: ACADEMIC WRITING AS A SPACE OF REPRODUCTION AND RESISTANCE
Discourse Analysis; National Common Curricular Base; Academic Writing; Researcher-Subject; Position-Taking.
This study aims to investigate how researcher-subjects take positions in relation to the discourse of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC – National Common Curricular Base), that is, to understand how discursive processes are constituted in their dissertations and the meaning effects they produce. More specifically, the study seeks to: (a) analyze how researcher-subjects, when producing master’s dissertations on the BNCC, make their position-taking explicit and align themselves with specific discursive formations, generating meaning effects related either to the reproduction of or the questioning of the hegemonic discourse of the official document; (b) examine how linguistic resources are articulated with the ideological positions assumed by researcher-subjects in relation to the BNCC’s institutional discourse; and (c) identify the discursive movements that emerge in academic writing about the BNCC based on the positions taken by researcher-subjects within debates on educational policies and Portuguese language teaching. From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, the research is grounded in French Discourse Analysis, drawing on the works of Pêcheux (2014a, 2014b). The study adopts a qualitative approach and is guided by an abductive research method, insofar as a theoretical framework directs the analysis of the data, particularly the concepts of identification and counter-identification proposed by Pêcheux (2014b), while the establishment of analytical categories only became possible through engagement with the corpus. The corpus consists of five professional and academic master’s dissertations obtained from the Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD – Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) and from online repositories of federal universities in Brazil. The results highlight discursive movements of reproduction, antagonism, and conciliation in the writing of researcher-subjects: at times, they act as replicators of institutionalized discourse; at others, they seek to oppose it or adopt a conciliatory stance through concessive structures. The findings also indicate a higher frequency of reproducing movements, which can be understood in light of the conditions of production in which researcher-subjects are situated and their intention to legitimize their own texts within academic culture.