CONTEMPORARY TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE ACADEMIC-SCIENTIFIC FIELD OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN BRAZIL: NEW HABITUS, MODI OPERANDI AND POINTS OF CONTENTION

Abstract

The field of Physical Education in Brazil has only recently come to systematically incorporate scientific research on a regular basis. In the first decade of the 21^st century, the field has expanded, diversified and become more dynamic, consolidating itself as an academic-scientific field with greater autonomy. Such a process is large and complex, demarcating a social space and forging its own habitus, with the struggle between agents and institutions around specific capital and new points of contention. This essay seeks to analyze this movement following the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu. The power generated in the field, and the struggles of agents to retain or transform it, are expressed in the disputes over the formulation of concepts and the ways in which these disputes have featured in the constitution of two modi operandi. These modi operandi manifest themselves as a way of conceiving the field and struggling to legitimize it, and as the formation of new generations of agents who structure ways of seeing it. In this context, it is observed that the modus operandi that has been spurring the academic-scientific development of Physical Education has led to the field’s progressive distancing from pedagogic debates.