Abstract
The Brazilian system of graduate and research evaluation which is based on the production and qualification of faculty members and graduate programs alike have intensified competition and tensions in these fields. This paper presents analyses of the data of the scholarship holders belonging to levels 1 and senior scholars considering that they make up the academic elite. We aim to attempt to reconstruct the processes that structured and structure the academic field of Education which are derived from objective relations between peers, institutions and (material and symbolic) resources. The Lattes Curricula of CNPq Research Productivity Grantees (2016) in Education are the empirical reference for the construction of the database of this research on those academic elites. The design of those structures allowed us to develop some preliminary hypotheses about the capitalization of the resources which are necessary for the different positions in the institutional hierarchies that shape the field of force and power in the scope of research production in the area. Our data indicate that despite the expansion of graduate programs in Brazil and attempts to displace the centrality of the Southeast in research, both economic and scientific powers are still strongly anchored in the Southeastern and Southern regions of the country.
Scientific field; Education research; Institutional hierarchies; Productivity scholarship