Utterances in Dispute

The purpose of this paper1 is to investigate how the institutional utterances produced by a public university in the state of Mato Grosso, in response to racial inclusion policies, shape the presence of black researchers in the scientific field. The institution was selected because it reflects national patterns of racial underrepresentation in research, serving as an empirical locus for analyzing broader structural processes. The investigation combines documentary analysis, a quantitative survey of the racial composition of the scientific workforce from 2000 to 2024, and qualitative data from a focus group, supported by the approach of Dialogic Discourse Analysis. The findings indicate that, by failing to explicitly incorporate racial equity as a structuring principle, the institutional utterances that regulate research policy contribute to the discursive and material reproduction of black underrepresentation in scientific production and coordination, thereby compromising the effectiveness of affirmative actions

Dialogic · Empirical research · Institution · Representativeness heuristic · Scrutiny · Workforce · Gender, Sexuality, and Education · Race, Identity, and Education in Brazil · Social Representations and Identity