Equity and comprehensiveness in the promotion of intercultural territories: Educational itineraries in the Cerrado

Abstract

This article analyzes how the principles of equity and comprehensiveness, when examined through the lenses of decoloniality and intersectionality, can generate critical shifts in professional training in health and in pedagogical reflection within the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), taking as reference the socio-political context of the Cerrado region of Mato Grosso do Sul. Grounded in Institutional Discourse Analysis, the study examines formative interventions conducted within Psychology internships, understanding them as pedagogical devices that can challenge colonial and normative rationalities embedded in public policies and spaces of social control. The analyses show that the so-called ‘advances’ are not limited to instrumental outcomes but are expressed in the production of critical reflexivity regarding discourses that sustain inequalities, abjection, and exclusion in intercultural contexts. By making discursive disputes and argumentative mechanisms mobilized in these spaces explicit, the article argues that problematizing equity and comprehensiveness constitutes, in itself, a pedagogical advance, as it fosters the education of professionals who are sensitive to differences, territories, and the ethical-political struggles that shape the production of care and public policies.