EVANGELICAL YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: A STUDY OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND ACTIVE MINORITIESSocial representations; Active Minorities; Evangelicals; Public university.
This project aims to understand the relationship of influence between two antagonistic worlds, of two representations, the university and the evangelical, which build their sociocultural perspectives within their spaces, whose structure is pre-existing and which exert influences among themselves through of the relationship with their interlocutors. Individuals are naturally committed to the values of the group to which they belong, especially when it comes to religious. The perception of belonging to groups, a construction of social identity, besides generating categorization and ideological leveling, produces a certain level of comfort during interaction with members. The research is justified in the presence of young evangelicals in public universities, which in this distance from their space of ideological comfort to a space of ideological confrontation, whose members are relatively active in the socio-political context, present emotional and intellectual tensions. Studies highlight the dropout of many young people who find it difficult to stay in universities. Similarly there are those who, staying and seeking comfort in collective groups. The university has become, in our century, the avant-garde space of independent and libertarian knowledge, especially within the human sciences, where not few conservative guidelines are defended, that is, a space of pluralist and democratic ideas. The problem of this work lies in the phenomena generated by the meeting of these two worlds: university and evangelicals. Research shows that universities in Brazil have been the environment of “several symptoms of student malaise”, especially among young evangelical university students, for their more conservative representations, who seek their welfare in private groups, such as University Biblical Alliance (ABU). Thus, the present research will seek to be based on two theoretical frameworks, presented as a suggestion of use, “Social Representations” and “Psychology of Active Minorities”, both by Serge Moscovici