The librarian’s education and political participation

Abstract

The aim of the study was to identify the students’ understanding of Librarianship at the Federal University of Goiás – Brazil, about public policies, political participation and its relationship of with the area. The study is qualitative in its approach and exploratory in its objectives. The population of the research consisted of students enrolled in the Public Policy Discipline of the Library Science graduation course of the Federal University of Goiás in the year 2019. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire with open questions applied to 25 students. Content analysis technique was used to treat the data. Results show that students understand public policies as actions and political decisions stemming from demands. And the State appears as the one that solves the problems of the Community through actions. Two notions of political participation were identified: one focused on engagement in electoral moments, the political act as the locus of participation; the other one, more conceptual, focused on the subject’s conscious appropriation of the individual’s acts and the way he/she acts in and for the world. Despite understanding what public policies and political participation are, they still cannot think about the political performance of the field of Library Science, which is, precisely, to promote informational meaning to the performance of the area.