Social Inequality: The Significations of Prounistas Psychology students from PUC-SP

Abstract

Social inequality is expressed, among other ways, in the difficulty of access to higher education. Compensatory and affirmative action measures were an advance in that they made room for blacks and peripherals to occupy university banks. The objective of this work was to analyse and understand the experiences, perceptions and subjective meanings made up of scholarship students from the University for All Program (ProUni – of the initials in Portuguese) of the Psychology course of the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP – of the initials in Portuguese) resulting from the meeting of poor students with the University, where different social classes meet. We emphasize the subjective dimension of the phenomenon, bringing reality (objectivity) to the constitution of subjectivity, in an attempt to overcome objectivist and subjectivist theories, appropriating us from dialectical historical materialism and Socio-Historical Psychology. Talks were held for the production of data with two scholarship students from ProUni who were attending the 5th year of said course in 2016. The speeches were understood and analysed in the light of social inequality, based on the proposal of analysis of the Nuclei of Meaning. The dialectical movement of the analysis has allowed us to explicit the subjective senses - painful and powerful - of the undergraduates in their unequal encounter with the university, that produced important shifts in their understanding of existence and resistance.