“She got there”: Meritocratic discourse and youth tactics for appropriating media capital in studies
Media capital; media; affirmative quotas; social inequality; ideology
The investigation works to expand the cultural capital inserted in digital culture and in the school experiences of peripheral young people. To do this, we critically analyzed the conditions of speech production in a reading and re-reading of the media by 13 young people from public schools in the Federal District, taking into account the appropriation of media capital between the years 2020 and 2022. The family provides the moratorium of youth, so that young women can study, as well as highlighting values such as hard work. When they say that their mothers are hard-working, they have to say how they should behave in the world of work. By having the teacher as a reference, the young women emphasize the importance of a professional who understands their social responsibility. When they use the media for academic purposes, young women have the teacher as their foundation. Understanding social inequality, some young women appropriate media capital as a tactic and use it in the symbolic struggle. The method reveals that ideology governs social practices by analyzing the colonization of subjectivities and noting that the denial of quotas, especially racial ones, and social inequalities themselves, align with hegemonic readings. The importance of the university experience, as well as the character of the educational institution and the choice of courses help to shape the media readings. We emphasize that the two-year follow-up highlighted changes both in the reading of meritocratic media and in the relationship with the appropriation of media capital.