"I wanna be a médico de postinho": connections and disputes between medical knowledge, anti-racist activism and the health of the black population

• Grant number: 22/14611-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): April 01, 2023
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Regina Facchini
• Grantee: William Paulino Rosa
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to investigate an antiracist activism constituted from its relations with medical practice. In the last twenty years, with the systematic implementation of racially-oriented affirmative action in public higher education, we have seen a larger contingent of black students accessing Brazilian universities. These processes also affect the most demanded courses, such as those in medicine, altering the composition of the student body, research topics, events in the area, the constitution of the health service workforce, and the practices, technologies, and medical knowledge. One of the effects of this process, still in course, can be observed from the emergence of many organizations composed by doctors who seek to articulate their professional performance to activism. Such organizations mobilize the health of the black population as an important category of their political-scientific actions, promoting the production and circulation of other categories, discourses, practices and knowledge. This research takes as its empirical frame a set of organizations that act in favor of the health of the black population, the transit of categories and subjects, as well as their connections with other actors and the production of frameworks for action. Thus, it aims to offer original contributions about the contemporary epistemic disputes waged from the intricate relationships established between activism, race, health and science.