LONELINESS, SUBJECTIVE DIVISION AND TIREDNESS:

trajectories of poor women in higher education

Abstract

This paper is the fruit of the maturation of research and reflections arising from teaching experience in higher education courses, mostly female, located in urban peripheral territories of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in particular, in the Baixada Fluminense. The method of historical materialism was chosen to investigate the main tensions faced by women in their academic careers and to understand how social, political and economic determinations influenced their choices and their permanence in these courses, based on three axes of discussion intimately related: territoriality, higher education and gender. This is an empirical qualitative and quantitative research whose data were obtained through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with female students from a Higher Education Institution in Duque de Caxias from three different courses and, with the use of triangulation, an attempt was made to collating the data with documental and bibliographical analysis. The results of the investigation point to the observation that the students, in the face of the objective and subjective conditions in the achievement of their higher education courses in Duque de Caxias, are subjected to a frank long-term process of alienation that results in the continuous confrontation of complex experiences and non-obvious challenges of a political, subjective and material nature with the predominance of various expressions of material and symbolic violence built throughout the history of the region in line with larger processes at the national level.