The discourse on racial quotas prior to law 12.711/2012: Academic literacies and the expansion of access to higher education in Brazil

Abstract

This article has an interpretative nature and aims to discuss the academic literacies in the context of affirmative action policies to expand the access to higher education in Brazil. For such, an overview encompassing the ideological and the autonomous models of literacies and about literacies and culture, focusing on black and indigenous populations was conducted. Following, conceptual issues regarding academic literacies were addressed based on the studies of Lea and Street (1998, 2014), as well as the notion of the institutional practice of mystery, discussed by Lillis (1999) and Lillis and Scott (2007). Two fragments of opinion articles published prior to Federal Law 12.711/2012 in Boletim, an academic journal of UFMG, were used in this article as a means to correlate the discourse about meritocracy used against racial quotas, affirmative action policies and academic literacies studies.