XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Who is this film for? Multimedia Methodological Reflections on Diasporic Solidarity in Access to Higher Education

• In Event: Interdisciplinary approaches to fieldwork in Brazil: ethnographic engagement through public scholarship, community organizing and cultural immersion

Abstract

The “Cost of Opportunity” short documentary was the result of a binational research project of the same name between Duke University’s Global Brazil Initiative and the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro’s Multidisciplinary Institute. The project, which initially took play in July 2017, brought together undergraduate and graduate students from both universities to investigate the recent expansion of higher education in Brazil through both quotas and the physical expansion of federal universities that resulted in the construction of over 200 federal university campuses between 2001-2007 in mostly rural and urban peripheries. This was the case of the construction of the Multidisciplinary Institute in Nova Iguaçu, one of the principal municipalities in Rio’s predominately Black and working class neglected urban periphery known as the Baixada Flumines. Stemming from interviews with UFRRJ-IM students and their parents, this film depicts the dreams and sacrifices of this new generation of college students and how they image both urban and social mobility. This auto-ethnographic paper will analyze the process of co-directing, editing, and showing the film with Nova Iguaçu based rapper, videographer and activist Dudu de Morro Agudo, as we sought to produce something that both represented the particularities of youth in the Baixada and could speak to the pursuit of higher education throughout the diaspora.

Author

• Stephanie Reist, Stanford University