Um estudo sobre a política de ação afirmativa: a implementação da Lei n.º 12.711/2012 nos IFETS (2014-2019)

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the affirmative action policy of racial quotas implemented in 12 Brazilian Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology (Ifets) and the relationship of such policy with the Law 12.711/2012. In order to this so, we assume that, with the approval of this law, also known in Brazil as the “Lei de Cotas” (“Quota Law”), a greater access of black students to the Ifets was promoted. In this context, the implementation of racial quotas guaranteed consubstantial changes in the practices of these institutions. Based on this proposition, we support, in this study, the thesis that the habitus incorporated by the agents responsible for the implementation of the mentioned law determine the way they conceive the legislation and the implementation of this affirmative action in the Ifets. This is justified since the agents responsible for elaborating, with the participation of the other actors, proposals for the implementation of this law, impose, on the debates held in the educational field, ways of perceiving the legislation to be implemented. These different modes, internalized in the form of habitus, engender institutional practices in relation to the affirmative action policy of racial quotas implemented in these social spaces. In order to support this thesis, we used the methodological approach proposed by Laurence Bardin (2016), the technique of content analysis, for the systematization and categorization of data. In addition to that, we used specialized literature and legislation to discuss affirmative action policy and Pierre Bourdieu's (1996; 2004; 2009) conceptual notions of field and habitus. Such notions supported our analysis of the habitus incorporated in institutional practices by agents during the implementation processes of Law 12.711/2012 in the educational field of the 12 Ifets surveyed. The results obtained with the present study demonstrated that such habitus, in the period before the implementation of the law, do not differ from those used by public universities in the first initiatives to adopt modalities of affirmative actions. There is also a predominance of the use of social and economic criteria for the selection of students who will benefit from this affirmative action policy. In relation to the incorporation of the provisions of Law 12.711/2012 to the Institutional Development Plan (PDI), the guiding document for institutional actions, we identified that the mentions incorporated into this document by the agents signal a predominance of social and economic criteria, when these agents refer to the affirmative action policy implemented in the educational field.