Affiliation of black and/or low-income students to the school of medicine: a literature review

Abstract

This article’s theme is the affiliation of black and/or low-income students to the school of medicine and aims to present a literature review carried out by bibliographical survey in the Catalog of Theses & Dissertations repositories, from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (henceforth Capes – Portuguese acronym that stands for Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) portal, Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (henceforth BDTD – Portuguese acronym that stands for Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações), Scientific Electronic Library Online (Scielo) and Google Scholar. The descriptors used were “affiliation (afiliação)”, “black student (estudante negro)”, “low-income student (estudante de camada popular)”, “quota holder (cotista)”, “medicine course” (curso de medicina)” and “Coulon”, combined with the Boolean logical operator “and”. The searches privileged the Portuguese language, as it is the Brazilian university context and, after refinement, considering the temporal delimitation of the last five years and the relevance to the epistemological focus given to the study, 20 productions were selected. The results suggest that black and/or lowincome students are still the first in their families to enter university, which is perceived by them as a space for resignification and social mobility. Racial, social, and economic matters permeate their entire university trajectory. It is perceived that the quality of life of these students is compromised so that they can achieve academic success. Therefore, the relevance of welcoming and the involvement of the university in the process of affiliation of black and/or popular students and the absence of analysis of subalternity relationships in Coulon’s concept of affiliation are considered.