Banca de DEFESA: MARIA VITÓRIA NUNES SOUZA

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : MARIA VITÓRIA NUNES SOUZA
DATE: 14/02/2026
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: UFRN- Laboratório de Psicologia - Sala 622
TITLE:

“Povoada, quem falou que eu ando só?”: Black Mother Researchers in Graduate Education

 

KEY WORDS:

aquilombamento; Black women; motherhood; graduate education

PAGES: 134
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Psicologia
SUMMARY:

Historically, spaces of research and knowledge production within universities have been restricted for Black mother researchers. During the 1970s and 1980s, Lélia Gonzalez denounced this racist structure by highlighting the place of the mãe-preta within Brazilian cultural neurosis. This position originates in the Brazilian colonial period, when Black people were not recognized as human beings with rights and were denied access to education. Such colonial logic persists to this day, determining who is considered a producer and holder of knowledge and which bodies are dominated and positioned at the base of social structures. Over time, racial affirmative action policies have sought to disrupt this system, representing significant progress in expanding access to higher education for Black people, including mothers. These advances were made possible by Black social movements that subverted dominant logics, with quilombos constituting their historical matrix throughout the history of racial oppression in Brazil. Nevertheless, there is still no nationally standardized regulation regarding racial quotas in graduate programs. Grounded in aquilombamento as an ethical-methodological inspiration, this study aims to analyze the experiences of permanence in graduate education among Black mother researchers, identifying instances of everyday racism and examining how participants articulate processes of ethnic-racial recognition. To this end, collective meetings were organized to foster the sharing of experiences, affects, and reflections on postgraduate trajectories at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). Five researchers participated in in-person and remote meetings; communication was also maintained through a WhatsApp group and phone calls, enabling the sharing of narratives even when collective presence was not possible. In dialogue with Brazilian Black women psychoanalysts and key authors of Black feminism, the analyses were conducted through an autobiographical and quilombist form of writing that intertwines the personal and the political. From these exchanges emerged three analytical threads: structural residues of anger that address structural and institutional racism, as well as the intersections of gender and race and their psychic inscriptions of individual guilt; the process of becoming Black within the university and motherhood, marked by ancestral events from which one does not emerge unscathed; and aquilombamento in graduate education as an invitation to recognize oneself in the other and as a political movement of being povoada—with our ancestors and the Black women researchers who will come—within a cycle that has no endings, only beginnings within beginnings.

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 3060449 - ANA CAROLINA RIOS SIMONI
Externa à Instituição - KÁROL VEIGA CABRAL - UFPA
Externa à Instituição - MARIA APARECIDA DE FRANCA GOMES - UFRN
Externa à Instituição - RENATA NASCIMENTO DA SILVA - UFRJ