Dr. Augusto's main interests are epistemologies of practice and the dynamics of knowledge in pluralist societies marked by power inequalities. Her current interests are science and technology policy and higher education policy in the Global South; the interaction between the technosciences, indigenous knowledges, and knowledges of the enslaved, particularly in Southern Africa, Brazil, the US, and the Caribbean; black transnationalism; and the conjunction of visuality, orality and digitality in African diasporic social movement websites. At the Watson Institute, Augusto has co-convened five Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI), three in Critical Global Humanities, and two in Engineering and Society ("Connections & Flows: Water, Energy and Digitial Information"). Augusto was a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil, in 2013-2014; has taught short post-graduate courses on indigenous knowledges, colonial sciences and transformation of higher education at the State University of Bahia; and is part of the design and teaching team of the Kwetu Leadership Institute in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Having designed and created a symbolic garden on the plant knowledge of the enslaved and an accompanying seed assemblage "Plants of Bondage/Liberation Flora" for the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Augusto is now a Faculty Associate of the CSSJ, working on a public humanities project "Red, Black & Green: Botanical interactions between enslaved Africans and the Narragansett and Wampanoag in Southern New England. Her current book project is "Sentient Quilombos: “People of the Waters,” Digitality, and Social Justice in Bahian Traditional Fishing Communities. From 1973 to 1991, Augusto worked in Southern Africa, as a book editor (Tanzania), and as a project economist and technical editor for SADC (Angola and the region). She also worked as a Portuguese/English interpreter, for a variety of ministerial, Frontline states, and UN meetings in Southern Africa and Europe. Since 1994, she has collaborated on numerous projects in the South African science and technology, higher education, and indigenous knowledge sectors, including the National Commission on Higher Education; the System-wide Review of Science, Engineering and Technology Institutions; and the First National Workshop on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Augusto previously taught at Harvard Kennedy School, from 1994 to 2002. She has consulted widely to public and nonprofit sector executives on organizational transformation. Geri Augusto holds a B.A. (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in economics (Howard), M.P.A. (Kennedy School, Harvard) and Ed.D., Human and Organizational Learning (GWU Graduate School of Education).
