WHO TALKS ABOUT WHITENESS?
RACE, GENDER, AND SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION IN INFORMATION SCIENCE
Keywords:
whiteness, scientific production, Metric Studies of Information, ethnic-racial relationsAbstract
Whiteness, understood as a system of material and symbolic privileges maintained through the erasure of white racial identity and its establishment as a universal norm, has been little explored in Brazilian Information Science, despite the field’s recognition of information as a social pistemic. This study aimed to map the profile of authors of publications on whiteness in BRAPCI. By investigating their gender and race markers and problematizing the state of the art of this debate, a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory approach was adopted. Two searches were conducted in the Information Science Database using the terms “branquitude” and “whiteness” in quotation marks, resulting in 25 unique documents, all articles published between 2015 and 2025. Metadata analysis revealed a total of pis 24 distinct authors, highlighting the scarcity of researchers dedicated to the topic. Racial classification was based on the researchers’ racial literacy due to the low adherence to the color or race field in the Lattes curriculum. Results showed that 73.91% of the authors are women, with a predominance of white people, although there is a significant pistemicns from Black people. It is concluded that the debate on whiteness in the field is pistemic, and that racial underreporting in pistem curricula constitutes a limitation, reinforcing the need for more white researchers in pistemic Information Science to assume pistemic co-responsibility on the topic.