Teaching
Understanding the new authoritarian movements. SESC-SP Research Center (2024)
This course introduces students to the study of authoritarianism as a contemporary, transnational phenomenon shaping both domestic and foreign policies worldwide. It begins with historical readings examining the foundations of Fascism and Nazism in the 20th century. The course then shifts to a diversity of contemporary analyses exploring the complex landscape of neo-authoritarian movements, their connections to historical fascism, and key distinctions among them. Ultimately, the course aims to reflect on the ecological politics of Brazil's far right in the Amazon, offering an understanding of its environmental and socio-political dynamics.
Plantation and Counter-Plantation. University of São Paulo (2024)
This course explores plantations as central structures of colonial modernity originating in the 18th century in the Brazilian Northeast, the Caribbean, and the southern United States, and expanding globally. Plantations rely on monocultures like sugar, tobacco, and soy, exploiting land and labor while simplifying landscapes and dismantling social networks. They have catalyzed the capitalist system and are seen as a foundational force behind what some call the "Plantationcene." The course also delves into plantations as sites of resistance, where enslaved people cultivated alternative “plot systems” of kinship and care and maintained cultural knowledge, even under exploitation. Through a comparative, interdisciplinary approach, it covers topics such as slavery’s role in plantations, ecological impacts, multi-species alliances, epidemics, and plantations' role in climate change, with geographical insights from the Amazon, Caribbean, and beyond. Taught together with professors Renato Sztutman, Karen Shiratori, and Emanuele Fabiano.
Indigenous Worldings. Princeton University (2023)
This course examines the Anthropocene not merely as the result of industrial greenhouse gas emissions but as a product of expanding neoliberal frontiers into remote regions of the planet. It explores how the ongoing climate crisis is driven by the systematic destruction of Indigenous worlds and the resistance strategies Indigenous communities are deploying across the Americas. A central question guiding the course is: How do Indigenous peoples resist colonial violence today? Using ethnographic studies, films, journalism, and art from Amazonia and other regions, this course foregrounds Indigenous perspectives to better understand the ways in which what is being destroyed is composed of different perspectives according to different groups. Emphasis is placed on the cosmological, ecological, and health dimensions of these conflicts, with a comparative approach that focuses on Amazonia while connecting to Indigenous struggles in the Andes, Central America, and North America.
Creative nonfiction workshop: socio-environmental narratives. Pulitzer Center - Federal University of Pará (2022) and Federal University of Acre (2024)
This three-day workshop in creative environmental writing is designed for journalists and scholars seeking to deepen their skills in vividly capturing and conveying complex socioenvironmental realities.
