Student communication said that seminar was not going to be accepted
The participation of Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in a seminar at the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil, was canceled after protests by students due to reports of sexual and moral harassment that he is targeted in Portugal.
According to the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, USP reported that it has canceled the participation of the Portuguese sociologist in a seminar entitled “The Future of Democracy or Democracy of the Future?”, Scheduled for August 25, because “the speaker is in health problems”.
However, the newspaper revealed that the teacher of the professor of the University of Coimbra to USP was the target of protests since the beginning of this week, when he was announced, because the academic was the target of a series of reports of sexual and moral harassment in 2023.
Students from the Academic Center Isis Dias de Oliveira, USP’s Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) released a statement on social networks by stressing that they would not accept that the event be hosted at the university.
“We are sending formal complaints to course coordination and the department, we demand that the event be canceled,” they said.
Three researchers who passed the University Center for Social Studies (CEST) of Coimbra denounced harassment situations by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 84.
The case motivated his removal and investigator Bruno Sena Martins of all the positions they held at CES in April 2023.
CES eventually created an independent commission to ascertain the complaints, having released in a report almost a year later, on March 13, 2024, which confirmed the existence of patterns of abuse of power and harassment by people in hierarchically superior positions, without specifying names.
According to the report then released to the Independent Commission, 14 people were reported by 32 complaints, in a total of 78 complaints.
