Junior Fellows

Allan Santos da Rosa holds a master’s degree (mestrado) and a doctorate in culture and education from USP. He is a fiction writer, a historian, and a capoeirista of the Angola School. As a playwright, Santos da Rosa has written award-winning pieces for theatre companies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais. As an independent educator, he has organised educational courses in Afro-Atlantic aesthetics and politics for over a decade. He has held lectures, recitations, workshops, and debates in rodas (the circular capoeira formation), fairs, universities, libraries, and community centres in Cuba, Mozambique, the United States of America, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Argentina.

Project: The Coexistence of Tenderness, Humour, and Violence: The Fire of Homes Pretos (Black Men)

Abstract:
My research project combines imagery, aesthetics, and political studies. It examines Black masculinities through the lens of stylistic resistance in the verbal arts, particulary labirintos (labyrinths) and enunciations that combine comedy/revolt, creativity/tutelage, and mockery/despair to challenge the pillars of an (Eurocentric and modern) idea of reason and contemporary notions of madness. In addition, I aim to understand the relationships between Black communities, our points of view on freedom, and the use of important resources in different social spheres that serve to build solidarity as much as authoritarianism. My study explores how Black men in Brazil and the African diaspora throughout the Americas entangle, refute, or slide past historical discourses of Brazilian nationalism. It is centred on Black expressions that tackle the basis of Western Reason and what it considers insane or irrational. Through irony, parody, nonsense, and mockery, Black verbal humour addresses the limits of this instituted notion of reason, sometimes in the midst of despair. Employing the techniques of silence, caricature, opaqueness, and fright, I use verbal expressions of defiance, riddles, and satire to confront the discoursive abasement of Black bodies and minds.

Main discipline: Educação/Literatura

Eugenia Brage graduated and received her doctoral degree in social anthropology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). She is a former Postdoctoral Researcher of the Cepid/Fapesp Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), co-housed at USP and CEBRAP. Her primary research areas are migration, the process of health/illness/medical attention and care, and sustainable living (sostenibilidad de la vida) both from an ethnographic approach and feminist points of view. She is currently a teaching staff member of the UBA’s undergraduate programme Trabajo Social, and has been part of various international projects and research groups, such as the Observatorio de Migração e Saúde and the CLACSO work group Migraciones Sur-Sur, among others.

Project: Sostenibilidad de la vida in transnational contexts: Ethnography with Bolivian women who reside in São Paulo and Buenos Aires

Abstract:

The project analyses methods of sustaining, maintaining, and organising life among Bolivian women who live in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina and in São Paulo, Brazil. I developed the project’s premise based on the postdoctoral research results I obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic with Bolivian women who live in São Paulo, in addition to the field work I carried out in Buenos Aires. This allowed me to compare the daily-life strategies in both migration contexts in terms of safeguarding life through housework (reproducción de la vida). My project involves an in-depth analysis of these materials using conviviality-inequality to approach the concept of sostenibilidad de la vida. This concept refers to the category of individual, collective, and communal tasks and activities – both in terms of economic production (productivo) and household work (reproductivo) – and the ethical-affective motivations that underly them. Thus, the project aims to contribute to two primary lines of research: firstly, to the conviviality debates on South-South migration and the subject of sostenibilidad de la vida in the Latin American context; and secondly, by confronting the concept of conviviality with feminist approaches and with epistemologies of the South, the project adds depth to the theoretical discussion.

Main Discipline: Social anthropology

Guilherme Bianchi holds a PhD in history from the Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP) and a graduate degree (mestrado) in history from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). His research interests include theories of history, indigenous history, and intellectual history. He has been a Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2018), and at the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Davis (2019). His doctoral thesis Historicidades em deslocamento: tempo e política entre os Ashaninka da Amazônia peruana e os Misak dos Andes colombianos (2020) examines the dilemmas and strategies of South American indigenous communities in the past and present, highlighting how these communities’ political activities and cosmological production fundamentally destabilise modern disciplinary and political traditions in various ways. His dissertation was nominated for the CAPES Thesis Award in 2021 by the Graduate Program in History of the UFOP and is currently being prepared for publication. Bianchi was awarded a fellowship from King’s College and the Canning House Library in 2022 to conduct archival research on the history of the Peruvian Amazon.

Project: Regimes of Conviviality in the History of the Ashaninka of the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract:

The societies of the Peruvian Amazon have always been concerned with conviviality as a means for coexistence between groups, throughout their long history before, during, and after colonisation. The project aims to examine the case of the Ashaninka groups residing in the Amazon region in contemporary Peru. Many indigenous discourses in the region are currently articulated through the ethos of conviviality and the intersection between embodiment and institutionalised political practices. Recent decades have seen various forms of violence in this region: armed guerrillas and the National Army, incursions from agribusinesses, developmentalist attacks, etc. Hence, Ashaninka communities reactivated discourses of conviviality out of necessity, in order to rebuild ties and reorganise community life. The practice of re-telling history, the collective memory of ancestral generations, the official sources of the Iberian monarchy, and even pre-Columbian records testify to other convivial contexts and dynamics of negotiation, friendship, and enmity. In this context, the project aims to trace the various lines that connect imagination and political action among the Ashaninka of the Peruvian Amazon.

Main discipline: History

Melanie Strasser studied Philosophy and Translation Studies at the University of Vienna, where she participated in exchange programs with the University of Porto and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Her doctoral thesis at the Department of Romance Language Studies at the University of Vienna dealt with the multiple relationships between anthropophagy and translation. During her doctoral studies she was a fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna and a visiting researcher at Yale University, the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), and the IAI. She has been a lecturer at the Center for Translation Studies in Vienna and currently works as an editor and literary translator.

Project: Translation as Hospitality. On the impossibility of (not) absorbing the Other

Abstract:

The research project “Translation as Hospitality. On the impossibility of (not) absorbing the other” seeks to explore the question whether the act of translation could be thought as a scene of hospitality. Ultimately, hospitality exhibits an aporetic structure, a constant oscillation between friendship and hostility; and a moment of violence, since every stranger, every guest must submit to the law of the host’s house, its economy and its language. In its double bind of amity and hostility, possibility and impossibility, hospitality seems to reflect the process of translation with its ambivalent feelings and approaches towards the Other that shall be translated, received and absorbed; in other words, that shall be brought under the law of one’s own language and culture. Considering an Amerindian perspective, the research project seeks to conceive translation as an ethics of hospitality, a xenosophy, as a process of becoming the Other by incorporating it. This involves letting go of any notions of identity, of a cultural horizon, and instead thinking of translation as a form of cannibal conviviality; an alterity in which it is indistinguishable who the translator and who the translated is, who the guest and who the host is.

Main discipline: Translation Studies