Critical reflections on the article "Teaching generations and legacy: building an academic excellence program"

Abstract

This essay engages critically with the article by Passiani and Moraes, published in the journal Sociologias (2025), about the Graduate Program in Sociology at UFRGS. While recognizing the empirical contribution in documenting institutional consolidation processes, the text proposes to challenge the narrative of excellence from perspectives of decoloniality and epistemic diversity. The analysis questions how excellence programs continue to celebrate criteria from the Global North and excessive metrification, thus reproducing colonial schemes. Training centrality, when not problematized, operates as a standardization mechanism that can generate epistemic exclusions and academic inbreeding.

The essay questions whether Sociology, in constructing its structures of excellence, might be naturalizing mechanisms of power concentration similar to those it identifies in other fields. An approach is proposed that emphasizes social commitment, intercultural translation, and the approximation of diverse knowledge systems, so that the public university does not limit itself to circles of self-legitimation, but integrates social relevance into academic excellence criteria.