A produção das diferenças no "chão da escola" e a interseccionalidade: um estudo do tipo etnográfico em uma escola em tempo integral em Natal-RN

Abstract

The concept of intersectionality, developed from political experiences and theories of black feminism in the United States, now finds its place in several academic fields, configuring what can be called a "knowledge project" (COLLINS; CHEPP, 2013; COLLINS, 2015), seen as an emerging construct without a fixed definition. In common among researches who adopt intersectionality as a theoretical foundation, it is the understanding that one-dimensional categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality or age are insufficient for a coherent interpretation to the complexity of the social world, which requires analyzes that capture the multidimensionality that forms the existence of the subjects. Thus, the objective of this research is to explore the possible applications of this concept for the understanding of persistent educational inequalities, considering the methodological potential of intersectionality in a micro-level approach, reaching the “school floor” with an interest in discovering how students were organized in their daily life and which differentiating factors could be highlighted for an intersectional analysis of the observed context at a full-time state high school in Natal-RN. The empirical stage of this research was carried out during the final months of the academic year 2019 and at the beginning of 2020, in an ethnographic study, with the field diary as the main work tool, built from the participant observations and information passed on by management team, teachers and students in everyday conversations, which we call ethnographic interviews (FINO, 2008). In this process, three prominent social markers of difference were identified for an intersectional analysis of inequalities in the context of the “school floor”: (i) the concentration in the same class of students with a history of failure, dropout, and the resulting social stigmatization; (ii) socioeconomic vulnerability and (iii) institutional and subjective limitations surrounding the debate on the racial issue. The contributions of these analyzes to public policies, guided by an intersectional lens, invoke the need for the debate on equity and the implementation of actions by educational management, aiming to understand the mechanisms of production of differences and denaturalize the reproduction of inequalities.