The debate about quotas in Brazilian public universities from 2001 to 2009: a preliminary analysis

This paper aims at presenting some preliminary findings of an ongoing research on the public debate over the racial quota policy in Brazilian public universities, from 2001 to 2009, in the following newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo and Estado de Minas. Our research distinguishes itself from previous studies because our corpus (692 articles) is wider hes and our unity of analysis consists of direct and indirect utterances (n=1037) that present any type of opinion upon racial quota policies. Our preliminary analysis reveals some very counter-intuitive findings: 1) we observed a polarization of opinions against and for the racial quota policy in editorial columns and op eds; 2) we noticed that common citizens are the most prominent speaker in the debate, surpassing actors who usually have privileged access to news media, such as federal government officers and experts. Our investigation about the category of speakers in the debate and our inquire into how their utterances are organized and hierarchised in the media arena show important tensions underpinning the media organizations, both on the inter-institutional levels and the journalistic social practices levels.