Affirmative Action and Epistemic Changes: The Emergence of the “Sociology of Emergencies”

One of the most effects of the implementation of the affirmative action policy in higher education is the increase in the presence of black students and students from lower classes at universities. The entry of this public means that new subjectivities become part of a universe, which until then was mainly made up of white, middle-class people. The “traditional” public of the Brazilian university system has been accused of collaborating in the reproduction of what sociologist Guerreiro Ramos calls “sociologia enlatada”, that is, a sociological practice that largely reproduces Eurocentric knowledge in an uncritical way. Students from affirmative action tend to provoke epistemic changes in their work.

Epistemology, as a theory of knowledge, investigates the standards used to evaluate knowledge or why we believe that what we believe is true. Patrícia Hill Collins assert that this is not an apolitical study of truth, but that epistemology indicates how power relations determine what is believed and why. The sphere of discussion around epistemology is important because it determines the questions that deserve investigation, the interpretative references that will be used to carry out the analysis and the purpose of knowledge.

The proposal of this communication allows us to think about how the process of racialization materializes in the production of knowledge by students. Scientific practice, far from being something neutral and objective, is fraught with several subjective aspects. The question is how and why race, in its social connotation, intervenes in the process of knowledge production. In other words, how black and brown students choose their objects of study and develop their postgraduate research in sociology. Thus, the processes of decolonization of the academic environment are focused.