At Aarhus University the 2nd semester students and assistant professor Georg Fischer have looked into the chaos that is going on in Brazil at the moment. There is both a political and economic crisis in the country, the corruption scandal with the state-owned Petrobras, the possible impeachment against President Dilma and the corruption scandal against ex-president Lula. In this article we take a closer look at the impeachment process that is happening right now with Dilma Rousseff as key player. How does the impeachment process work? To begin the process, the speaker of the lower chamber of Congress has to accept a petition for impeachment, in order to decide whether the president should face impeachment. If they vote no, nothing happens. If yes, the president must go on trial. The speaker then forms a 65-member congressional panel to investigate the accusations and decide if removal of the president is warranted. The panel is comprised of representatives from all political...

Friday the 15th of April, professor Ricardo F. Reis from Universidade Católica de Lisboa gave a lecture at Brazilian Studies at Aarhus University about the importance of the Portuguese language economically today. Back in Portugal he teaches financial accounting at the MBA in Lisbon, and has previously taught both Cost, Financial Accounting and other courses in Economics and Business. He started out by asking the audience if they know which 9 countries are Portuguese-speaking. A student helped him out: Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bisseau, East Timer, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. Hereof the largest economy is Brazil, which is the 8th largest in the world. He continued by telling us there are 250 million Portuguese speakers worldwide, where 200 of them come from Brazil. It is, however, a bit uncertain whether the Portuguese is the 4th most spoken language, while some sources says otherwise. On the internet Portuguese is the 2nd...

Peter Haldborg started studying Brazilian Studies back in 2009, and is now almost done with his master’s degree. He is currently working as the student instructor for 2nd semester students helping with their grammar and language skills and is notorious for repeatedly proclaiming: “Rather make one million mistakes and succeed once, than not making any mistakes and not succeed!” He has been in Brazil a total of four times, each time in Rio de Janeiro. Being brutally honest he admitted he now wished he chose a different location to begin with, but as he said himself: “You create a special connection with the place when you’ve been there for 7 months! You feel comfortable and create a solid foundation, and if I went someplace else, I'd have to start all over...”. He went there twice to study, one time to travel in the area and the final time for the sake of doing fieldwork. He told us about his experience of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro:” When I came back for my second stay in 2012, I ...