Gender and race relations inside schools and in academic spaces: experiences of young black women at the University of Brasilia

This article presents the experiences of four black female students admitted by the University of Brasilia through the affirmative action programme. They attend courses in Electrical Engineering, Medicine, Pedagogy and Social Work. Analysing different courses enables a reflection on how different contexts, with distinct mechanisms of regulation, can produce different representations of gender and racial relations. By choosing students of different academic courses we are interested in observing the strategies to overcome racism and prejudice linked to the contexts or to the relational processes where their identities are constructed. We are not interested in producing a general overview about the situation of the students, but in obtaining some insights about their representations of gender and race relation. Through their narratives we try to comprehend the relevance they give to school and academic experiences linked to racism and prejudice and also the mechanisms which influence their position concerning these issues.