WHAT GATES DO QUOTAS UNLOCK? A Counter-Hegemonic Evaluation of Affirmative Action
in RN
racial quota policy; public policy evaluation; social trajectory; counter-hegemonic
evaluation. and higher education.
Grounded in dialectical historical materialism and Racial Sociology, this research conducts a
counter-hegemonic evaluation of the racial quota policy, focusing on the state of Rio Grande do
Norte. The study assumes that hegemonic evaluations, limited to quantitative access indicators,
are insufficient to gauge the policy's real impacts, thus proposing to investigate the following
question: how has the racial quota policy altered the trajectories of Black quota holders who
graduated from undergraduate courses in federal higher education institutions in Rio Grande do
Norte? Its general objective is to evaluate how the policy altered the social trajectories of these
graduates, unfolding into the specific objectives of identifying the socioeconomic profile of quota
students in federal institutions in RN between 2013 and 2023 and analyzing changes in their
social trajectories during and after undergraduate studies. Methodologically, the counter-
hegemonic evaluation approach is adopted, combining a quantitative stage – using cluster
analysis and descriptive statistics to build profiles from secondary data – with a qualitative
stage, based on narrative interviews to capture the experiences and learnings of the
beneficiaries themselves..