From public school to public university

“It's not only to get in but also to persist!”

Abstract

Brazilian education has always been on the agenda in political debates and academic studies, and it’s pointed out as the time/space in which historical social and racial inequalities persist. This reality directly interferes with prolonged school trajectories, access, and permanence in higher education. In this text, we work with students who had access to public universities with the advent of affirmative institutional and governmental policies and social inclusion implemented in the early years of this century. The study aimed to understand schooling trajectories and biographical paths of female university students from poor families, who graduated from public schools and declared themselves of African descent, an underrepresented segment in higher education institutions, characterised as a white territory. From an interdisciplinary perspective, which advocates interaction between two or more disciplines and makes possible the complementarity of conceptions, social justice, cognitive justice, and intersectionality are discussed. The investigation had a qualitative design, based on the study of multiple cases as a research strategy, and used socio-demographic questionnaires and reflective interviews. The analysis of the results highlights the contradictions experienced at the university, the difficulties related to student permanence and affiliation processes, and the mobilisation of university students to conquer spaces and visibility in their respective courses. Affirmative policies impact academic production because these “new students” bring a diversity of knowledge and different issues that demand other dialogues with the hegemonic knowledge.