THE FACES OF THE PRECARIZATION OF TEACHING WORK IN BRAZILIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

The expansion and reforms of Brazilian higher education, associated with the logic of commodification and transformations in contemporary capitalism, have brought significant changes to the conditions and organization of teaching work. In this context, this article aims to analyze the characteristics of the precarization of teaching work in Brazilian higher education, considering the transformations resulting from the processes of reform and expansion of this educational level. This is a bibliographic and documentary study based on an analysis of Universidade e Sociedade, a nationally circulated journal published by the National Association of Higher Education Faculty (ANDES). The research corpus comprised 45 articles published between 2011 and 2018, organized into three empirical categories: financing; state and public policies; and teaching work, the latter being the focus of this analysis. The results indicate that the precarization of teaching work is expressed through academic productivism, work intensification and overload, temporary employment contracts, and the fragmentation of the teaching-research-extension triad. The conditions imposed on temporary faculty members also contribute to professional devaluation and the need for multiple institutional affiliations. It is concluded that these transformations are related to the logic of flexible capital accumulation, contributing to the deepening of the precarization of teaching work in Brazilian higher education.