RACISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION: SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK STUDENTS

The study aimed to identify the social representations of Black university students regarding racism in higher education. This is a descriptive, exploratory, and qualitative research, grounded in the Theory of Social Representations, with a structural approach. Participants were 52 self-declared Black students from undergraduate and graduate Nursing programs at a federal university located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire and the technique of free word associations, using the inductive term “racism in higher education”, recorded with the support of the OpenEvoc software. Data collection was facilitated through a QR Code made available on social media, posters, and classroom visits. The analysis involved the standardization of the evoked words, the development of a term dictionary, and the construction of the four-quadrant chart in OpenEvoc, considering frequency and mean order of evocation. The corpus of the study consisted of 253 words, with the central core comprising: prejudice, unacceptable, discrimination, inequality, and fear. The first periphery included: harassment, sadness, veiled, crime, loneliness, and exclusion. The contrast zone presented: shame, suffering, dropout, and quotas; while the second periphery highlighted the word struggle. It is concluded that the representations reveal racism as perceived to be frequent, generating feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness, with a direct impact on academic persistence. Despite affirmative actions, significant barriers to the permanence of Black students in higher education remain, associated with discrimination, prejudice, and covert harassment. The study recommends the expansion of institutional policies to combat racism, along with the strengthening of initiatives aimed at support, retention, and representation in the academic environment.