Coastal Resilience in Brazil
My latest work seeks to reframe the ecological crisis faced by favelas and peripheral communities along the Mata Atlântica. After 15 years of working with activists in the favela, I am hoping to create an ecological network connecting youth activists from favelas to rural communities, training them to create environmental portraits, and developing an advisory board to plan an AI system that monitors ecological challenges on the social margins. My current project takes me to Atafona, Boipeba, and Ilhéus, all communities along the Atlantic coast that are resisting climate crisis.
Atafona
Atafona is one of countless communities across the globe that is disappearing into the sea due to coastal erosion. Over the course of a week in July 2024, I helped to organize a group of youth from Brazil’s periphery joined with senior scholars in Atafona to explore the social anxieties created by 60 years of degrading coastlines and wave-like dunes that have buried homes. Participants experimented with capturing the ethnographic conditions of a disappearing landscape through collaborative photographic practice. We explored the culturally defined notion of ‘ruin’ amidst environmental crisis and the end of the Anthropocene. In this article, we question the dominant narratives that frame Brazil’s coastal periphery as a no-man's land — inherently ruined and anxiety-inducing — unable to resist the force of an increasingly violent Atlantic in the age of global warming.
Serra de Misericórdia
Environmental Racism
In collaboration with the NGO Raizes em Movement, I design and implement environmental workshops with youth from the Complexo do Alemão, Maré and other peripheral communities
In 2024, my desire for sustainable research in the favela was accelerated when Brazil’s government announced the Instituto Federal do Rio de Janeiro-Alemão (IFRJ-Alemão) — set to be the world’s first public university in a favela (shantytown). Nonetheless, an immediate problem of sustainability emerged because the most influential international organizations and governments are often prohibited from working in the favela of Alemão, home to Rio's most powerful drug faction, due to street-level violence and precarious living conditions. While higher education will be more accessible than ever in Brazilian favelas, the next generation of scholars will still be cut off from international collaboration.
The prohibition of outside resources is particularly damaging for Alemão, a community with the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, air pollution, heat, and deforestation in the city. The Serra da Misericórdia forest bordering Alemão is one of the last surviving patches of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest) in Rio’s densely populated North Zone, yet environmental defenders receive no logistical support. Residential development, urban mining, and highways are encroaching on the forest, while drug traffickers use the bush for target practice. I believe that, without concise and long-term forms of academic intervention, social violence, prejudice, and institutional caution will continue to prevent the next generation of favela-born scholars from addressing the escalating ecological crisis.
