Final Workshop 2025

São Paulo, CEBRAP, 17-18 November 2025

Programme

Monday, 17 November 2025

9h30: Opening: Barbara Potthast (Mecila PI, Universität zu Köln) and Mário Medeiros (Mecila PI, Universidade de Campinas)

10h – 12h: Panel “Afterlives of Slavery: Lethal Intersections and Aesthetics of Haunting”

This panel stems from the diagnosis that, in post-colonial democracies, violence is a technology of governance and a mode of communication between power and inequality. The diverse “afterlives of slavery” emerge in the constant negotiation of violence—at the limits of conviviality—in racialized bodies and territories. The panel explores both the “lethal intersections” that produce political assassination and the aesthetics of resistance that respond to it. Subversion operates through living bodies that, whether on the parliamentary stage or in the theater, perform a public, haunting, and uncomfortable mourning, challenging the normalization of death.

Huri Paz (Afro-Cebrap)
“Lethal Intersections and Political Violence in Rio de Janeiro: The Lídia Menezes Case”

Drawing from the assassination of deputy mayor Lídia Menezes in Magé (RJ), this work analyzes how body and territory become co-producers of political lethality. Inspired by the notion of Lethal Intersections, the study shows that lethal political violence is not a deviation but rather a form of communicating power in racialized territories, where the murder of Black women is converted into a mechanism for stabilizing democratic hierarchies. The case is interpreted as a “lethal intersection” between gender, race, and local power.

Livia de Souza Lima (Mecila Junior Fellow)
“’There is no death penalty in Brazil’: The Production of  Unsettling Astonishments as a Black Feminist Aesthetic of Resistance”

This work analyzes how elected Black women in the Rio de Janeiro Legislative Assembly (ALERJ), hailing from favela territories, have produced an aesthetic-political repertoire that I term unsettling astonishments—performances, enunciations, and affective gestures that potentially interrupt the normalization of racialized state violence by producing discomfort and discursive rupture. Taking as a starting point the anti-slogan “there is no death penalty in Brazil,” uttered on the plenary floor and part of the grammar of the Brazilian anti-racist movement, I examine how this type of critical intervention reaffirms, and simultaneously destabilizes, the liberal promises of justice and equality by exposing their racialized suspension in the peripheries. In close dialogue with the thought of Denise Ferreira da Silva, I argue that these performative acts operate as epistemological and affective disquietudes within the institution, revealing how the grammar of raciality structures the very possibility of law, humanity, and the value of life. Drawing from the parliamentary reactions to the murders of Kathlen Romeu and João Pedro, I show how these representatives transform pain into political language, destabilize the public security imaginary, and affirm the right to life as a field of symbolic and aesthetic dispute. I conclude by proposing that discomfort, understood as a political affect of resistance, can function as a counter-current to the logic of fear—a force that mobilizes vulnerability, memory, and indignation to create alternative forms of presence and collective imagination.

Mirian Souza (Mecila Senior Fellow, Universidade Federal Fluminense)
“Afterlives of Slavery and Poetics of Conviviality: Theatre Marronage as Subversion”

This paper argues that Theatre Marronage, a performance form inspired by the Theatre of the Oppressed and developed with refugee artists and researchers in Rio de Janeiro, subverts scenes of racial subjugation. The performance demonstrates how racialised subjectivity resists capture, seeks life, and persists in the face of anti-Black dehumanisation (Hartman 1997). Drawing on the concepts of the afterlife of slavery and conviviality, the discussion examines Theatre Marronage as an academic-artistic practice within the project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World. Through Marronage, racialised subjects challenge and reshape spaces defined by bureaucratic violence and racial governance. Souza shows how participants transform trauma into a poetics that challenges and subverts racial subjugation.

Discussant: Paulo Ramos (Afro-Cebrap)

12h – 14h: Lunch at CEBRAP

14h – 17h: Workshop with Patricia Hill Collins, Mecila and CEBRAP Researchers
(Only for pre-registered participants)

Tuesday, 18 November 2025

10h30 – 12h: Distinguished Lecture

Michael Ralph: “Life: From Slave Insurance to Convict Leasing in the antebellum US”
Breaking with the consensus among historians that slave insurance is distinct from life insurance because slaves were legally classified as property, my research demonstrates life insurance was built from the legal rationale and commercial logic of marine insurance and, later, slave insurance. While previous studies of slavery and insurance have largely focused on slaves as cargo, I reveal why after the slave trade to the US was outlawed in 1808, people who held slaves in abundance preferred to rent rather than to sell them. Rented slaves were usually insured so planters could recover the value of these premium human assets if they died while in someone else’s possession. So many slaves were rented by private firms and entrepreneurial individuals that, during the last few decades of legalized slavery, a thriving market in slave insurance emerged that privileged slaves in select industries. If my research on insurance reveals that even people who were enslaved could inhabit social standing approximating that of dehumanized free workers, other research explores how free people can be trapped in a predicament that approximates slavery. I close by suggesting revisions revises the scholarly consensus on the history of convict leasing, demonstrating that it did not begin in the US with the 13th amendment as a way to keep African Americans in a predicament approximating slavery, but instead started several decades prior in a prison that initially held only white people.

Discussant: Rúrion Melo (Mecila PI, Universidade de São Paulo)

12h – 14h: Lunch

14h – 15h30h: Book Critique

“Comunidad urbana: conversaciones entre Berlín y Bogotá”, by Talja Blokland and Sandra Pulido-Chaparro (Ediciones Uniandes, 2024)
Discussant: Tita – Letizia Patriarca (Mecila Junior Fellow)

“Biblioteca Mecila-CLACSO Vol. 6: Branquitudes/Blanquitudes. Diálogos latinoamericanos sobre convivialidad y desigualdad”, by Mário Augusto Medeiros da Silva, Patricia de Santana Pinho, Roosbelinda Cárdenas and Hugo Cerón-Anaya [Org.] (CLACSO/Mecila, 2025).
Discussant: Benjamin Junge (Mecila Senior Fellow)

15h30: Coffee

16h- 17h30: Distinguished Lecture
Christian Zamora Rodríguez (Universidad de Costa Rica): “Archivos vivos: estrategias críticas para la gestión y preservación de datos desde el patrimonio cultural en Centroamérica”

Al respecto de la gestión de la información en Centroamérica, una reflexión activa sobre cómo gestionamos, compartimos y preservamos los datos en la investigación en las ciencias sociales, reconociendo su papel como patrimonio vivo y herramienta de transformación. En respuesta a los desafíos técnicos, éticos y políticos que enfrentan los quienes investigan en Centroamérica. Se presentarán herramientas y metodologías para fortalecer la sostenibilidad de bases de datos, repositorios y fondos documentales, con énfasis en la experiencia del Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad de Costa Rica. La conferencia busca fomentar una mirada crítica y colaborativa sobre la reutilización de datos, la visibilidad del conocimiento y la construcción de redes regionales para la preservación digital.

(Translation: Regarding information management in Central America, an active reflection on how we manage, share, and preserve data in social science research, recognizing its role as a living heritage and a tool for transformation. In response to the technical, ethical, and political challenges faced by researchers in Central America. Tools and methodologies will be presented to strengthen the sustainability of databases, repositories, and documentary collections, with an emphasis on the experience of the Social Research Institute of the University of Costa Rica. The conference seeks to foster a critical and collaborative perspective on data reuse, knowledge visibility, and the construction of regional networks for digital preservation).

Discussant: Christoph Müller 

17h30 – 18h Closing Panel: Next Steps and Looking Forward

Christoph Müller (Mecila Director, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin), Tomaz Amorim (Mecila Academic Manager) and Juliana Lugão (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)