"The Brazilian public university guarantees enrollment, but does not guarantee authorship." This phrase, which summarizes the central argument of Guilherme de Almeida's thesis, points to a problem that does not immediately appear in access statistics, but reveals itself in the academic journey of many students.
Defended on April 16, 2026, at the Faculty of Education of Unicamp, the thesis entitled Presence/Absence of Autistic People in Public Higher Education: neurocognitive justice and historical-creative authorship as emancipatory praxis. This research investigates how the university, even after advances in the field of rights, still operates with standards that hinder the permanence and production of knowledge by autistic people.
The research, linked to the Study and Research Group in Philosophy and Education PAIDEIA and developed with funding from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), was supervised by Professor Sandra Fernandes Leite and had a panel composed of Professor César Nunes (FE-Unicamp), Professor Francisca Geny Lustosa (UFC), Professor Rita Cossio (UFPel), and Professor Vanessa Dias Bueno de Castro (FE-Unicamp).
Presence is not synonymous with permanence.
The starting point of this thesis is a simple but rarely addressed observation: being in university does not necessarily mean being able to exist within it on equal terms.
“The Brazilian university was designed for a specific cognitive pattern — long lectures, standardized assessments, socialization as an implicit criterion of belonging. None of this is neutral,” says Guilherme. “It’s an institutional architecture that works well for those who process information in a certain way and silently penalizes those who don’t.”
The data helps to illustrate this asymmetry. According to the 2022 Demographic Census, Brazil has approximately 2,4 million autistic people, equivalent to 1,2% of the population. In higher education, however, this group represents only 0,8% of students—an asymmetry that, according to Almeida, stems not from barriers to access, but from the conditions of academic retention and progression.
According to the researcher, the problem cannot be solved simply with access policies. "The right is recognized; the conditions that would make it effective are not transformed," he summarizes.
Neurocognitive justice
One of the central axes of the thesis is the notion of neurocognitive justice, which guides both the diagnosis and the proposals of the work. By neurocognitive justice, Almeida means the recognition that different ways of processing and producing knowledge require distinct institutional conditions, not merely punctual adaptations to a single structure.
From accessibility to authorship
Another important conceptual shift lies in the distinction between accessibility and authorship—reformulated, after the defense, as historical-creative authorship. “Accessibility refers to the conditions of the environment. Authorship is the moment when the student ceases to be the object of policies and begins to produce knowledge based on who they are,” explains the researcher.
In practice, what predominates in universities are ad hoc adaptations: extra time for exams, individual flexibility, solutions negotiated on a case-by-case basis. While necessary, these measures do not alter the structure that creates the barriers.
“This generates a cumulative effect of wear and tear. The student continually needs to justify their presence, request minimum conditions, and negotiate their continued enrollment,” he states. “At the end of the journey, the cost is not only academic—it is also subjective.” In his own trajectory, he says, formal access was never the main obstacle. “But the conditions for producing knowledge as an autistic person had to be built manually. This cannot depend on successful individual encounters. It needs to become institutional policy.”
A system for evaluating the institution.
The thesis's propositional dimension is materialized in the Dynamic Ecological Assessment System (SAED). The starting point is to invert the dominant logic: instead of evaluating the student, it will examine the university. "The problem is known to those who work with inclusion: the available instruments measure what the student cannot do, but do not identify what the institution fails to offer," he says.
SAED combines three tools — an institutional analysis matrix, a case study protocol, and a map of articulation between sectors — that operate in an integrated way. The idea is to produce a continuous diagnosis capable of guiding concrete interventions.
“The Matrix cross-references what the university declares, what its data shows, and what students experience. From this, it is possible to measure the gap between discourse and practice,” explains Almeida. The goal is for each individual interaction to contribute to broader changes: “moving from case-by-case adaptation to building cumulative institutional transformation.”
A chain of barriers
To explain why isolated adaptations do not solve the problem, the thesis proposes the idea of a "demobilization cascade." This refers to a chain of obstacles—from the classroom to institutional policies—that, when combined, lead to the intellectual disengagement of the student.
“Each barrier, in isolation, may seem tolerable. The problem is the combined effect,” says the researcher. “It is this chain that explains why access does not translate into quality retention, nor into knowledge production.”
The implication is straightforward: it is not enough to intervene at one specific point. It is necessary to act simultaneously on curriculum, assessment, teacher training, infrastructure, and management.
Technology and mediation
The thesis also discusses the role of artificial intelligence on two distinct levels. On the one hand, as a tool for institutional analysis, capable of identifying inconsistencies between what the university claims and what it actually practices. On the other hand, as a resource to support student autonomy.
“When used as a means of mediation, technology can enhance communication and knowledge production,” says Almeida. “But there is a principle that cannot be violated: it must operate in service of the individual, never in their place.”
Beyond the thesis
Guilherme de Almeida's research is part of a broader agenda for the dissemination of knowledge. Some of the concepts he developed are already being translated into books aimed at different audiences, covering topics ranging from adult life on the autism spectrum to pedagogical practices in basic education.
In the field of public policy, the work also unfolds through the author's presidency of the National Association for the Inclusion of Autistic People (Autistas Brasil), an organization of advocacy an autistic person who works in strategic litigation and on legislative fronts regarding inclusive education and the rights of autistic people.
Among the stages under construction is the pilot application of SAED in dialogue with the Stanford Neurodiversity Project (PNS). The choice of partnership is not incidental: the PNS is a research space about and with autistic people, whose constitution already starts from neurocognitive plurality as a condition of functioning, not as an exception to be accommodated.
According to the author, this allows testing the SAED within an environment that embodies the methodological inversion proposed by the instrument: an institutional framework conceived from within the autistic experience, and not as a subsequent adaptation to a standard that excludes it. In parallel, efforts are underway for a pilot application at a Brazilian public university, a step that Almeida considers unavoidable: “The SAED was conceived from and for the Brazilian public university. The international partnership is important because of the institutional model it offers, but the decisive test needs to happen here.”
