Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Universities worldwide face a persistent tension between the expansion of access to higher education and the persistence of curricula structured by Eurocentric, white, and male epistemologies - a phenomenon that decolonial scholarship describes as the coloniality of knowledge. This study investigates this tension through an emblematic Global South case: the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), the largest public university in Northeast Brazil. We examined the presence and absence of the social markers of gender, race, and class in 3,248 course syllabi from 81 undergraduate programs, spanning the university's five major institutional areas. The analysis combined qualitative documentary analysis with Descending Hierarchical Classification (DHC) processed in IRaMuTeQ software - a scalable, replicable mixed-methods approach for large-scale curriculum audits. Of the total corpus, only 126 syllabi (3.9%) directly mentioned the social markers, revealing low curricular transversality despite a robust national and institutional regulatory framework. The DHC identified four lexical classes − (1) epistemological critique of Western modernity; (2) aesthetic-urban racialization; (3) explicit intersectional approaches; and (4) normative-legal content - that reveal distinct regimes for incorporating social markers. Curricular silence is concentrated in Engineering, Exact Sciences, Computing, Natural Sciences, Accounting, Communication, Archival Science, Vernacular Language Studies, and Music, whereas critical clusters emerge in the Humanities, Health Sciences, Education, and the Arts. We argue that this pattern configures a model of selective incorporation, in which claims of technical neutrality sustain historically consolidated epistemic hierarchies. By articulating these findings with international scholarship on epistemic justice (Connell, Fraser, Lugones, Kilomba), the study offers a replicable methodological model for auditing university curricula in other Global South contexts and argues that mainstreaming gender, race, and class requires deliberate institutional policy, not mere regulatory compliance.</p>