Meeting of knowledge: trajectory of a cause in Brazilian public universities
Since the beginning of the 2000s, and especially after the implementation of the Federal Quota Law in 2012, Brazil has emerged, worldwide, as the country with the most comprehensive affirmative action program in higher education. In addition to reserving places (quotas) for black candidates, a growing number of public universities have organized specific selection processes for indigenous candidates, relying on the principle of “differentiated” education, guaranteed by CF88 and the curricular guidelines for indigenous school education. The entry of this new public into universities is accompanied by a demand for symmetry of value between academic knowledge and so-called traditional knowledge. A series of pedagogical and administrative devices have since been developed aiming to materialize this symmetry, summarized in the expression that has become a flagship: “meeting of knowledge”. I will present an overview of these initiatives and, based on an ethnography conducted at the State University of Campinas, I will show the positioning of some of the actors involved in them, or implicated by them, especially the indigenous students at Unicamp.
Chantal Medaets is Professor of Anthropology at the Faculty of Education at Unicamp, where she coordinates the Center for Research in Anthropology and Education (Ceape). In her current research, she addresses different aspects of the indigenous presence in Higher Education in Brazil, combining ethnographic fieldwork at Unicamp with the analysis of intercultural policies for Higher Education at the national level.
Photography caption: National Meeting of Indigenous Students, July 2022, Unicamp. Image author: Sheldon Yupuri Barreto