Activist Research Methods as Solidarity Practice in Brazil
Dr Keisha-Khan Perry (University of Pennsylvania)
This talk draws from the book I am currently writing entitled Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice. I describe how my work with local Gamboa de Baixo activists in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil has been a collaborative process that develops activist research methods and that produces data, scholarship and creative works that support urban social struggles against forced displacements. Engaged ethnographic practice becomes crucial for understanding the beautiful and harsh realities of Black women’s grassroots organizing amidst community and state violence. I engage foundational questions of ethical collaboration, collective liberation, and solidarity practice as consistent principles in the Black diaspora anthropological tradition.
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she taught in Africana Studies at Brown University for 15 years. She writes on urban social movements fighting against the violence of forced displacement and is the author of the prize-winning book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), an ethnographic study of Black women’s activism for housing and land rights in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador. With an emphasis on the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil, she continues to write on issues of Black land ownership and loss and the related gendered racial logics of Black dispossession in the Americas. As reflected in her talk, she is also interested in Black women’s intellectual histories and disciplinary formations, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement.