BETWEEN URGENCY AND INVENTION: THE FORMATION OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY WITHIN CAPES AND ITS EPISTEMOLOGICAL PARADOXES

Abstract

The text reconstructs the historical formation of Capes’ Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Area, emphasizing that its creation in the late 1990s resulted less from a deliberate epistemological project and more from an institutional need to accommodate proposals that escaped traditional disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on Bevilacqua (2011), the analysis shows that the area emerged under a regime of administrative urgency, during a period of rapid expansion of graduate programs, the growth of hybrid initiatives (such as IAI and LNCC), and the lack of evaluative criteria capable of addressing interdisciplinary objects and methods. Although Capes later began consolidating the Interdisciplinary Area, epistemological debate remained secondary, producing a field marked by tensions between innovation and standardization, flexibility and bureaucratic framing. The text also examines the depreciative academic imaginary within Brazil’s graduate education system, reinforced by the absence of institutional recognition within CNPq, which sustains the mistaken perception that interdisciplinarity is a “scientific leftover.” It argues that interdisciplinarity must be actively defended and disputed epistemologically, institutionally, and politically, as it is not residual but structurally necessary to address the complex problems of the 21st century. Finally, it stresses that interdisciplinary research must be aligned with a program’s Areas of Concentration, Research Lines, and Integrative Projects, countering the misconception that any topic can be accommodated within interdisciplinary programs.