Undergraduate Psychology: The presence of whiteness-blackness related themes in Political-Pedagogical Projects

Abstract

Considering the scarce academic exploration towards racial relations in Psychology undergraduate courses and the diverse manners of exploration facing the issue, this research aims to investigate if and how the discussion surrounding racial relations, focusing on the whiteness-blackness unity, is presented in the Political-Pedagogical Projects (PPPs) of four Psychology undergraduate courses offered by São Paulo State public universities. Fundamented by Cultural-Historical Psychology theoretical references, it is conceived that psychological science is a human construct historically forged on the production and reproduction of life relations, its main theoretical premises are based on the ideal image of a white universal individual, located in a eurocentric or north-american context. Historically, psychology in Brazil has faced three moments that, synthetically, can be identified as the adoption of the black person as a object of study in the early 20th century; the permeation by the racial democracy myth; and the conception of race as a human construct, demarcating material e symbolical inequities, therefore, being a constitutive factor of subjectivities by providing an unequal locus to individuals. In this context, this investigation is justified by the identification of a gap in research related to racial issues discussions inserted in psychology undergraduate education. In order to analyze the documents, the Content Analysis methodology, developed by Bardin, was elected. The method allows the development of final categories which originate on the search for previously elaborated indicators on the PPPs redactions. These categories then will be interpreted in light of Cultural-Historical Psychology, aiming to apprehend the latent contents, meaning the essence of the contents manifested on the documents, in other words, the manner in which the phenomenon is immediately presented.