The Federal University of Acre, since the creation of the Faculty of Law in 1964, through the institutionalization of the University Centre of Acre in 1970, the creation of the University of Acre Foundation in 1971 and its federalization in 1974, to the present day, is constituted as the only public and free federal university to develop higher education in the state. Currently, of the twenty-two Acre municipalities, eighteen are connected by land, facilitating the expansion of higher education in the state, and for the other four municipalities, there are still logistical difficulties, since the connection is established only by river and air. Acre is connected by land with the other Brazilian regions, and also with neighbouring countries (Bolivia and Peru), including access to ports on the Pacific Ocean, enabling the regional insertion of UFAC.
O Plano de Desenvolvimento Institucional (PDI 2020-2024) norteia o foco das ações institucionais nos dias atuais, na esteira das transformações tecnológicas, o Acre se incorporou ao circuito mundial das redes de comunicação global. Em outras palavras, a Universidade Federal do Acre, que sempre foi descrita com a marca do “isolamento geográfico” e pelas limitações da interação acadêmica, hoje se defronta com os desafios postos pela globalização, na medida em que todos os canais deste processo se comunicam com a região acreana, em maior ou menor intensidade. Assim, no contexto local e global em que está inserida nesta segunda década do século XXI, a UFAC tem atravessado um paradigma técnico-científico em transformação, onde se exige cada vez mais o uso de métodos transdisciplinares, interdisciplinares e reflexivos, com elevado grau de responsabilidade social. Essas transformações estabelecem novas exigências acadêmicas para se enfrentar as grandes questões e/ou desafios socioeconômicos acreanos da nossa época.
The regional insertion of a university with the characteristics of UFAC, located outside the national political-economic axis, demands much more effort so that its mission to produce, systematize and disseminate knowledge can be fulfilled. All academic actions need to be referenced and committed to the regional and local reality. This is the contemporary sense regarding the regional insertion of higher education, arising from the learning of the last decades.
This commitment does not mean the relaxation of the theoretical, historical and instrumental dimensions of the institution's academic actions. On the contrary, considering the regional context in the formulation of pedagogical projects, including research and extension actions, requires the protection of the principles of scientific rigor that underpin each of the areas of knowledge of the university. In this way, the insertion of the Federal University of Acre in a region with many weaknesses in the technical-scientific and economic fields faces challenges located in different sectors of activities and social categories, in a more complex context than that of five decades ago, when the history of the UFAC began. The awareness of these challenges requires that the policies of teaching, research and extension, in all its dimensions, are formulated and implemented based on the Acre reality, without prejudice to the criteria that make up the framework of the modern scientific standard.
In this sense, the Postgraduate Program in Languages: Language and Identity (PPGLI - UFAC) has played a leading role in the region with regard to the training of teachers for higher education in South-Western Amazonia, an area of great strategic importance in Amazonian and Pan-Amazonian geopolitics, since it involves the whole of the state of Acre, the south of the state of Amazonas, the west of the state of Rondonia and a wide range of borders with the Peruvian and Bolivian Amazons. This part of the Amazonian and Pan-Amazonian region comprises distinct Amazonian territories of forests and cities which together have a population of over 10 million people, with significant ethnic, linguistic, cultural and social diversity. Just to give you an idea, in addition to Portuguese and Spanish and all their variations, in the Amazonian area of Acre alone, with its geographical and cultural borders, there live together thousands of 15 thousand speakers of twelve indigenous languages of the Aruak (Ashaninka and Manchineri), Arawa (Madija) and Pano (Apolima-Arara, Jaminawa, Katukina, Kaxinawa, Nawa, Nukini, Puyanawa, Shawãdawa, Shanenawa and Yawanawa linguistic families.)
It is in this sociocultural and geographic context that PPGLI - UFAC is embedded, being of fundamental importance for the continued training of teachers and other professionals in basic and higher education in the areas of literature, history, education, geography, philosophy, social sciences, arts, sociology and others for professionals working in municipal, state and federal education networks, as well as NGOs and research institutes and other government agencies. The Federal University of Acre has two campuses in the State, one in the capital and the other in Cruzeiro do Sul, added to the four existing nuclei where permanent or occasional teacher training courses are offered in agreements with the state government and municipalities.
In 2008 the Federal Institute of Acre - IFAC was established in Acre. Today it has six campuses, four of which are in the Acrean cities of Cruzeiro do Sul, Tarauacá, Xapuri and Sena Madureira. Today, many teachers of this institution have done or are doing a Master's degree in PPGLI and are professionals who aspire in the short term to continue their post-graduate studies at the doctoral level.
Numerous characteristics and singularities connect Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the South-Western Amazon, indicating possibilities to trace effective academic exchanges in various areas of knowledge, notably in the areas of Linguistics and Literature, Humanities, Social and Natural Sciences. Not coincidentally, UFAC receives many Bolivian and Peruvian students in their undergraduate and graduate courses, who seek this institution, mainly because it constitutes a public university and offers graduate courses that are very rare or non-existent in their home countries.
As can be seen, the whole of the state of Acre, the south of Amazonas, the west of Rondônia and the Amazon regions of Peru and Bolivia share social, political and cultural spaces with common characteristics, marked by a wide linguistic, cultural, ethnic and identity diversity. These spaces enable different research and studies, exchanges and production of didactic material for basic education, notably aimed at serving indigenous populations and other human communities in cities and forests, some of which are difficult to access, expanding the reach of university actions and contributing to the strengthening of the Linguistics and Literature Area at a regional level, in the Amazon region where, at present, UFAC is the only institution with installed capacity for the creation of a PhD in this area, also contributing to the strengthening of the area in Brazilian states such as Rondônia and Amazonas, fundamentally, considering the peculiarities of PPGLI.
It is also necessary to consider the geographical division of the international Amazon or Pan-Amazon, a macro set of territories that covers a significant part of South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. As far as Brazil is concerned, Amazonia corresponds to the impressive total of 61% of the national territory, with a population of approximately 17 million people, spread over more than five million square kilometres. From this total, we should point out that in the territorial strip covered by the states of Pará, Amazonas, Roraima, Tocantins, Acre, Amapá and Rondônia, that is, the expressive majority of the Brazilian Amazonian states, we have only two post-graduation courses at PhD level in the area of Linguistics and Literature: the first at the Federal University of Pará and the second at the Federal University of Tocantins, both in the eastern part of Amazonia.
This framework points to the important role to be played by the masters and doctoral courses in the Postgraduate Program in Language and Identity at the Federal University of Acre, located in the westernmost part of the vast Amazon region, especially with regard to ensuring essential continuing education opportunities for researchers and teachers in this part of Brazil and neighboring countries and contributing to minimize regional deficits and asymmetries.
The PPGLI - UFAC began its academic activities in 2006, with the implementation of the Master's Course in Language and Identity and, in 2019, after the approval of the proposal of APCN in the previous year, the doctoral course begins with the admission of the first class. Since its implementation, until
Since its implementation, the Program has graduated 241 graduates, most of whom work in higher education, basic education or in organizations that work with issues related to the priority lines of research of the Program.
Based on the Language and Culture Area of Concentration are the two research lines of PPGLI: Cultures, Narratives and Amazonian Identities; Lingua(gens) and Teacher Training, which house twenty-two research projects and an entire curricular structure with compulsory and elective courses which allow the transit and circularity around ideas, concepts and theories.
A Program in the Linguistics and Literature Area, which, in its composition, "addresses literary, linguistic and interdisciplinary studies, whose critical-theoretical, descriptive and analytical focus has as its object of analysis the language and literature in its various scopes. Such studies go through several perspectives, such as translation studies, cultural studies, applied studies, and issues related to teaching". Considering interdisciplinarity as a basic element of "its critical-theoretical conception, allowing a resizing of its objects and research methods, leading to an epistemological reflection attentive to various possibilities of analysis", according to documents of the area.
In this direction the PPGLI of UFAC has in its main focus the interdisciplinary character as a means to face the great challenges for the Area of Linguistics and Literature, which is configured in facing the "demands brought by the XXI century that do not find answers in disciplinarization, in compartmentalization and in the division of knowledge. Inter and transdisciplinary actions, aimed at the integration among disciplines and the displacement of rigid disciplinary boundaries, are, therefore, fundamental to the scientific work of contemporaneity".
In the scope of the Programme, linguistic and literary studies have always interacted, fed and fed back on approaches from the field of cultural, decolonial and gender studies, cultural translation, teaching and teacher training, besides other different research objects from the Amazonian and Pan-Amazonian universes.
The Program has procedures and criteria for the Accreditation, Reaccreditation and Discreditation of Professors, in accordance with the recommendations of the area documents, and annual student selection processes, with eliminatory and classifying stages and a well-defined affirmative policy to promote social inclusion.
The Program is responsible for publishing the journal Muiraquitã - Revista de Letras e Humanidades, a biannual, non-profit electronic vehicle, with the objective of promoting the exchange, circulation and dissemination of studies and research in the areas of Linguistics and Literature, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The journal became electronic in 2015, with the ISSN 2525-5924. Previously, the journal had another record due to the printed support: 1807-1856.
The electronic version of Muiraquitã Journal is registered with DOI: https://doi.org/10.29327/210932, and has the h5 index in Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=7i4RgW4AAAAJ&hl=pt-BR&authuser=1
Maintained by a public and free Federal Educational Institution located in one of the most strategic Amazonian and Pan-Amazonian frontiers, Muiraquitã does not charge any fees for the publication of contributions in the form of its guidelines and is available for reading and downloading completely
free of charge. Among its main focuses is the diffusion and circulation of research results and ideas of professors and undergraduate and postgraduate students from universities of this macro region, as well as connecting with the experiences of teachers of basic education and with the different forms of production and transmission of knowledge of human communities and social movements of the Amazonian-Andean forests and cities.
In specific calls and continuous flow, contributions (articles, interviews, essays, translations and reviews) may be free (miscellany) or linked to thematic dossiers organized by researchers in the field.
Currently, the journal has eight published volumes, with two issues each, including thematic dossiers, involving Brazilian and foreign researchers.
In 2020, a recomposition of the editorial team included specific foreign language reviewers and permanent work of Portuguese language reviewers, as well as a social communication team to disseminate calls and news regarding the journal on social networks.
The Editorial Board includes teachers from PPGLI as well as teachers from PPGs from other regions of the country and abroad, such as Ana Pizarro, (Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Chile), Jossiana Arroyo Martínez (University of Texas, Austin campus, United States) and Maria Clotilde Chavarría (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru).