Revista de Estudos de Cultura

About Revista de Estudos de Cultura

Revista de Estudos de Cultura (REVEC): Journal Profile

The Revista de Estudos de Cultura, known by its acronym REVEC, is a Brazilian peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the interdisciplinary study of culture. It is published by the Núcleo de Estudos de Cultura (NEC, the Culture Studies Centre) of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFS), a federal university headquartered in São Cristóvão, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Sergipe. The journal carries the online ISSN 2446-7189, the identifier under which it is registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and under which its articles are matched in Crossref. REVEC is an open access title: every issue is published online in full text, free of charge to readers, and the journal charges authors no submission or publication fees.

What distinguishes REVEC within the crowded field of Brazilian humanities journals is its deliberately cross-disciplinary architecture. It was created to bring together researchers from the humanities, the social and applied social sciences, language and literature studies, linguistics and the arts, and to let them work on shared questions about modern and contemporary culture without the hierarchy that usually places one discipline in charge of the others. Its home centre, the NEC, also serves as an autonomous international pole of CLEPUL, the Centre for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures of the University of Lisbon, which gives the journal a structural connection to Portuguese and wider European scholarship that is visible in its editorial boards and in the geography of its contributors.

History and Development

The institutional roots of the journal reach back to August 2012, when the Universidade Federal de Sergipe hosted the seminar "Culturas em negativo e a modelação de identidades" (Cultures in the negative and the modelling of identities) between 29 and 31 August. That meeting marked the official foundation of the Núcleo de Estudos de Cultura, and it was attended by Professor José Eduardo Franco, director of CLEPUL at the University of Lisbon, consolidating the agreement between UFS and the University of Lisbon under which the NEC operates as an international research pole of the Lisbon centre. The seminar's theme — the "antis", conspiracies and myths through which cultures define themselves by negation — also supplied the thematic programme of the journal's first issues.

The first edition of the Revista de Estudos de Cultura appeared in 2015. The opening volume year was organised around the founding seminar's theme of "Culturas em negativo" (Cultures in the negative), with issues gathering essays on subjects such as anti-racism, anti-clericalism, anti-capitalism and other "anti" formations in Brazilian and Portuguese cultural history. The journal appeared three times in its first year, in four-monthly instalments covering January–April, May–August and September–December 2015. Later volumes settled into the twice-yearly rhythm that the journal's current editorial pages state, and the run has continued steadily: by 2026 the journal had reached its twelfth volume, with recent issues carrying work on digital education, queer literature in the classroom, cultural diversity in teacher training and the history of education in Sergipe, among other topics.

Several milestones mark the journal's professionalisation. In the Brazilian Qualis journal-ranking system administered by CAPES, the national agency for graduate education, REVEC was classified B4 for the 2013–2016 evaluation period, rose to A4 for 2017–2020, and received a B2 classification in the 2021–2024 evaluation announced in 2025 — a sequence the journal itself reports in its published history, and one that prompted a round of editorial-policy adjustments in 2025. In 2020 the journal became an associate member of ABEC, the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors, began assigning DOIs to its publications, and adopted ORCID identifiers for authors. In 2026 it added the Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutional identification and adopted the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence for its content; earlier issues had been released under the more restrictive CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 terms recorded in the UFS institutional repository. The journal's web presence has likewise been consolidated on the university's periodicals portal, where its current about pages, editorial team and author policies are maintained.

Scope and Subject Coverage

REVEC describes its focus as the critical study of contemporary cultural phenomena. Its stated remit covers modern and contemporary culture with emphasis on its organisational, representational and symbolic aspects — that is, on how cultural forms are produced and institutionally organised, how they represent identities and communities, and how symbols circulate between the local and the global. The journal explicitly aims to break down disciplinary barriers and to encourage approaches that connect tradition and contemporaneity, theory and practice.

In practice, the disciplinary span is wide. The journal welcomes work from the humanities, the social sciences and applied social sciences, language and literature studies (Letras), linguistics and the arts. Published issues illustrate the breadth: historical studies of language teaching in nineteenth-century Brazil sit alongside analyses of music and identity, essays on cinema and audiovisual culture in teacher education, discussions of digital literacy and public education policy, and case studies of cultural diversity in Mozambique. The audience the journal names for itself — researchers, university teachers, graduate students and professionals in language, linguistics, arts and the human and social sciences — matches this span.

The journal publishes several genres of contribution: original research articles, essays, reviews and interviews, from both Brazilian and international contributors. Thematic organisation has been a feature since the founding "Culturas em negativo" trilogy, and later issues have been built around themes such as music and identity and the history of language teaching, giving the journal a character that combines open submissions with curated thematic conversations.

Publisher and Editorial Structure

The publishing institution is the Universidade Federal de Sergipe, acting through the Núcleo de Estudos de Cultura. The DOAJ record names the Universidade Federal de Sergipe as publisher, with Brazil as the country of publication, in agreement with the journal's own pages. The NEC's postal address, as recorded by the UFS institutional repository, is at the university's São Cristóvão campus: Avenida Marechal Rondon, Bloco Administrativo III, sala 8, Bairro Rosa Elze, São Cristóvão, SE.

Editorial leadership is shared between two editors-in-chief, Luiz Eduardo Meneses de Oliveira and Eliabe dos Santos Procópio, both of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe. Professor Oliveira has been associated with the journal since its founding issues, which he co-edited in the journal's first year. Beneath the editors-in-chief sits an editorial board (Conselho Editorial) of around a dozen scholars drawn from Brazilian universities — São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Santa Maria, Bahia, Mackenzie and UFS itself — and from Portugal and Germany, including members linked to CLEPUL in Lisbon, the Universidade Aberta and the University of Bamberg. A larger scientific council (Conselho Científico) adds further Brazilian and international referees, and the masthead also lists dedicated language reviewers for Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, reflecting the journal's multilingual ambitions, plus design and layout staff. This layered structure — editors-in-chief, editorial board, scientific council and language revision team — is typical of established Brazilian university journals and is published in full on the journal's editorial team page.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

REVEC is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, where its record (added in February 2018) confirms the ISSN 2446-7189, the publisher and the absence of author charges; the DOAJ classifies its subject area under the social sciences. Inclusion in the DOAJ is a meaningful verification point because the directory applies published quality criteria covering peer review, licensing and transparency of editorial information.

The journal's most consequential domestic metric is its Qualis CAPES classification, the ranking that Brazilian graduate programmes use when evaluating where their researchers publish. As the journal reports in its own history, its classifications have been B4 (2013–2016 cycle), A4 (2017–2020) and B2 (2021–2024). Readers should treat these as period-specific: a Qualis stratum applies to a defined evaluation window and changes between cycles, so the current figure should always be checked against the latest CAPES release rather than quoted from older pages.

No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate and no Scopus CiteScore are claimed for this journal, and none should be inferred: REVEC's verified credentials are its DOAJ listing, its Qualis history and its DOI-registered, ORCID-linked publication record since 2020. Its articles are registered with Crossref under the DOI prefix 10.32748/revec, which is the prefix visible in the DOIs of its recent articles.

Publication Model, Licensing and Fees

REVEC operates a no-fee open access model. The journal's DOAJ record states that it has no article processing charges and no other author charges, and its about page commits to immediate free access to all content on the principle that making scientific knowledge freely accessible democratises it worldwide. There is no paywall for readers and no submission fee for authors.

Licensing has liberalised over the journal's life. Repository records for the early volumes show a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), while the journal's history states that in 2026 it adopted CC BY 4.0, the most permissive Creative Commons licence, under which authors retain their rights without restriction. Authors checking reuse conditions for a specific article should confirm the licence printed on that article, since the terms changed over time.

Submission and Author Guidance

Submissions are handled through the journal's page on the UFS periodicals portal, where the current author guidelines, peer review policy and fee policy are posted (the DOAJ record links directly to the journal's APC and peer review pages on that portal). The DOAJ records the journal's review model as single-anonymous peer review — reviewers know the authors' identities, while reviewers remain anonymous to authors. Manuscripts are assessed for fit with the journal's interdisciplinary scope before and during review, and the journal's published evaluation culture emphasises originality, relevance to cultural studies and adequacy of the scholarly apparatus.

Practical points for prospective authors, drawn from the journal's official pages: the journal appears twice a year; it accepts original articles, essays, reviews and interviews; contributions from outside Brazil are welcomed, and the journal maintains language revision capacity in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French; since 2020, published items receive DOIs and authors are identified with ORCID. Because editorial policies were adjusted in 2025 following the latest Qualis cycle, authors should read the guidelines on the live portal page rather than relying on cached copies, and should confirm formatting, anonymisation and licensing requirements at the moment of submission.

How to Verify This Journal

To confirm that a journal calling itself Revista de Estudos de Cultura is the title described here, check the ISSN 2446-7189 against the DOAJ record for that number, which names the Universidade Federal de Sergipe as publisher. Cross-check the editorial team on the journal's own portal page — the editors-in-chief named above should appear. Article DOIs should resolve under the prefix 10.32748/revec. The journal should never request payment to publish: its verified policy is that no fees of any kind are charged, so any payment demand attached to this title is a warning sign of an impersonating site. Finally, the Qualis stratum quoted anywhere for REVEC should be checked against the evaluation period it belongs to, since the journal's classification has legitimately changed between cycles.

The Journal in Practice: Content and Conversations

REVEC's recent tables of contents show how its interdisciplinary charter works in practice. A single recent volume moves between the history of education — an essay on education as the civilising process of the founders of Sergipe's own court of relations — and classroom-facing work on queer literature as a tool for inclusive teaching, digital literacy in mathematics teacher training, and students' perceptions of digital technologies in secondary education. Alongside these sit cultural analyses of a different register: representations of anguish in post-punk songs, the recognition of Mato Grosso cinema and audiovisual production in teacher education, oral-language teaching analysed through dialogic theory, and an interdisciplinary extension project documenting artists in the Pernambuco town of Gravatá. The international dimension promised by the journal's charter is also visible: a case study of cultural diversity in teacher training in Mozambique connects the Sergipe journal to the wider Portuguese-speaking world that its CLEPUL affiliation implies.

Two recurring centres of gravity can be identified. The first is education understood culturally — teacher formation, language teaching and its history, literacy and the cultural politics of schooling — reflecting the profile of the journal's home research centre and its editors. The journal's early thematic issue on the history of language teaching (2017), with studies of French teaching in nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, English methods in Brazilian schools and the institutionalisation of Spanish teaching in commercial education, established this line. The second centre is the study of cultural representation — music, cinema, literature and song as sites where identities are organised and contested — continuous with the founding "Culturas em negativo" programme, which examined how Brazilian and Portuguese cultures have historically defined themselves through opposition: anti-racism answering racism, anti-clericalism answering clerical power, and so on through dozens of "anti" formations catalogued across the first three issues of 2015.

The Lusophone Connection

The journal's link to CLEPUL — the Centre for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon — is structural rather than decorative. The Núcleo de Estudos de Cultura is an autonomous international pole of that Lisbon centre, its founding seminar in 2012 was held with CLEPUL's director present, and scholars linked to CLEPUL appear on both the editorial board and the scientific council of the journal, alongside colleagues from the Universidade Aberta and other Portuguese institutions. For readers, this means the journal functions as one node in a Brazil–Portugal research network on Lusophone and European cultures; for authors, it means submissions are read within a community that spans both countries and that works comfortably across Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, the four languages for which the journal maintains dedicated revisers. The postal and institutional address remains Brazilian — the journal is unambiguously a Universidade Federal de Sergipe publication — but its intellectual geography is deliberately binational.

Reading and Using the Journal

All content is freely readable on the journal's portal pages, and the UFS institutional repository additionally preserves complete PDF issues from the journal's earlier years, with full tables of contents, which is useful for locating the thematic issues of 2015–2018. Since 2020, individual articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.32748/revec and can be cited and resolved individually through Crossref; authors are identified by ORCID where available, and from 2026 institutions are identified through ROR. Researchers citing the journal should cite it by its full title, Revista de Estudos de Cultura, with the ISSN 2446-7189, and should be alert to the licence change described above when reusing older material: pre-2026 articles were issued under CC BY-NC-ND terms, while the journal's current licence is CC BY 4.0. Graduate students in Brazil — the journal's core constituency — will also want the current Qualis CAPES stratum for the relevant evaluation window when reporting publications, since the journal's classification has moved between cycles (B4, then A4, then B2).

Strengths, Limits and Fit

For authors weighing REVEC against other Brazilian humanities journals, its strengths are a genuinely interdisciplinary readership, a binational Brazil–Portugal scholarly network through CLEPUL, a documented Qualis trajectory in the Brazilian evaluation system, DOI and ORCID infrastructure since 2020, and a completely fee-free open access model. Its limits are those of a regional university journal: it does not carry the commercial citation metrics of the large international indexes, and its visibility outside the Lusophone world still depends largely on the networks of its contributors. It is a particularly good fit for work on contemporary culture that crosses the humanities, social sciences and arts, for Lusophone and comparative cultural research, and for scholarship on education read as a cultural phenomenon; highly specialised single-discipline work, or work with no cultural-studies dimension, will sit less comfortably in its pages.

At a Glance

Revista de Estudos de Cultura (REVEC) — ISSN 2446-7189; published by the Núcleo de Estudos de Cultura, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, São Cristóvão, Brazil; founded 2015; semiannual; interdisciplinary cultural studies across the humanities, social sciences, languages and arts; open access under CC BY 4.0 (earlier issues CC BY-NC-ND); no author fees; listed in the DOAJ; Qualis CAPES B2 in the 2021–2024 cycle; articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.32748/revec.