A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STATE OF THE ART ON THE STUDY OF SMALL CITIES IN GRADUATE PROGRAMS OF BRAZIL

Abstract

It was only recently that small towns got a space in Brazilian academic production, since for many years these towns had little prominence in the academia, which research was carried out on big Brazilian cities and metropolises, but a few was said about small and medium-sized cities. However, in the last few years it can be said that there has been an increase in the number of researches dealing with these small towns. This paper aims to present a contribution to the state of the art about small cities in scientific production, emphasizing dissertations and theses of graduate programs of several Brazilian universities. For this purpose, a search was made in the thesis and dissertations database of graduate programs in Geography, analyzing 48 researches that addressed small towns as an object of study. These analyzed theses and dissertations were then grouped into different categories, where briefly were presented what each of them is about and how small towns were investigated in these scientific productions. It was noticed that small towns are treated under different approaches in the analyzed studies, each one with different methodologies and problems, and this plurality of researches on these locations is of great importance for the research scenario in this area.