Memories and narratives from black people at Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia
Ethnic-Racial Relations. Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia. Narratives. Identities.
The present study discusses the education for ethnic-racial relations at Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia, Campus Paulo Freire, and the role of affirmative actions in the process of formation and transformation of individuals in the university environment. This study originates from the reflections made with quota holder students, problematizes the esteem and stigma (GOFFMAN, 1975) of being black in this educational institution and seeks to understand aspects of ethnic-racial relations from the perspective of the participating individuals and their experience reports. By applying a semi-structured questionnaire among black students entering the Basic Admission Area/ABI, we analyze the ways in which these students recall and report their experiences and enunciate their identity belonging through their narratives. The narratives of these students are being analyzed in the light of theoretical-methodological questions formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) and Lopes (2013), for whom narrating the experience of individuals treated as subordinates has become a tool of resistance and alternative source of knowledge, and from the perspective of Nora (2004) and Rodrigues (2005) who discuss memory and multicultural characteristics, respectively. We structure this text by presenting affirmative action policies at the national and regional levels, then discuss the aspects of education for ethnic-racial relations and, finally, analyze the experiences and memories of quota students as a strategy for approaching relations. ethnic-racial groups to understand how these students (re) build their identity. With the result of the study, we made a book with the purpose of contributing to the debate about absences and stereotypes of African descent ethnic groups in Brazilian society, bringing to the center of the discussion the formation and transformation of the individual through their own narratives.