(Dis)Connecting the academia: conservative wave, attacks to university and how the legal system has been mobilized to protect us during the 2018 elections

This paper aims to trace the evolution of the anti-gender discourse concerning Brazil’s primary and higher Education. We inquire how this issue is intertwined with the anti-minority one, which includes both standing against affirmative action policy programs and the conservative groups fighting the so-called “gender ideology.” This will be done by tracing the roots of anti-gender and anti-minority discourses at national and international levels to understand better how the Brazilian case takes part in the global trend. Next, focusing on the 2018 elections as our hallmark period, we hope to contribute to this literature by presenting an accurate narrative of the Brazilian case from a comparative perspective. First, we start with an overview of the anti-gender and anti-minority discussion relating it to the attacks on Education. In the second section, we reconstruct the 2018 electoral period. Third, we trace the international cases of censorship in schools and universities.