BEHIND THE SCENES OF CLEANING: MEMORIES AND SCHOOLING OF OUTSOURCED WOMEN IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Resumen

The study aimed to understand how outsourced female cleaning workers in higher education institutions construct meanings about education, their schooling trajectories, and the very right to learn, based on their memories and life experiences, highlighting processes of social and educational invisibility that intersect gender, race, and class. Methodologically, this is a qualitative study grounded in a bibliographic review of academic works on Youth and Adult Education (EJA), outsourcing, and women’s labor, articulated with critical theoretical frameworks such as those of Paulo Freire, Karl Marx, Silvia Federici, and Pierre Bourdieu, in addition to the analysis of narratives and empirical studies that explore the experiences of outsourced workers in different Brazilian universities. The results showed that these women, mostly Black and with educational trajectories marked by interruptions, face precarious working conditions, exhausting routines, and double or triple workloads—factors that hinder access to and permanence in formal education, while also reinforcing their invisibility within the academic space, where they are recognized only as service providers rather than as educational subjects. It was also observed that, despite these adversities, there remain desires to resume their studies and strategies of resistance, indicating the central role of education as a possibility for social transformation and future projection. It is concluded that educational institutions reproduce contradictions by advocating for the democratization of access while symbolically excluding these workers, making it necessary to rethink institutional and public policies that ensure real conditions for access to education, the valorization of labor, and the recognition of these women as rights-bearing subjects, thereby contributing to overcoming the structural inequalities that sustain their invisibility.