My current research project, "The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in Brazil, Jamaica and the United States," provides a global perspective on localized struggles for land throughout the Americas. The research illuminates the historical meanings of citizenship, material culture and diaspora.

This research explores the historical conflict around black land ownership and loss in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States. In the Americas, struggles for land take place against the local and global backdrop of blacks' historical struggles against enslavement and the multitudinous symptoms of colonialism and racial domination evident in modern-day society. Present-day mass evictions of blacks in cities and the emergence of social activist movements to preserve black lands and neighborhoods can be traced to the slavery period. In Brazil land loss has been systematic and occupies the heart of the black movement. In the United States land acquisition and land-rights struggles have always been key aspects of the black civil rights movement. And yet, African American land ownership has steadily declined in the 20th and 21st centuries. In Jamaica land redistribution was a key issue at the heart of the anticolonial and independence movements, and the "slash and burn" approach to revitalizing Jamaican urban neighborhoods is widely documented. A global perspective on localized struggles for land throughout the black diaspora in the Americas is urgently needed. This research illuminates the historical meanings of citizenship, material culture, and diaspora. It examines how blacks in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States have understood the importance of land over time, specifically the relationship between land, freedom, and national belonging.

Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University, “Transnational Feminist Political Thought and Praxis in Brazil,” 2014-2015, ($15,000).

Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, “Engendering Governance and Grassroots Activism in Jamaica,” Summer 2014, ($5000).

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brazil Initiative Grant, Brown University, “The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas," 2014-2015 ($2000).

“bell hooks’ ‘The Oppositional Gaze’ in Brazil: Translation and Black Diasporic Feminist Thought,” in Traduções da cultura: perspectivas críticas feministas (1970-2010), Claudia JL Costa, Editor (forthcoming, Spring 2017).

Book Review Forum Essay: (Invited) Zenzele Isoke, Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance, for National Political Science Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2015)

“State Violence and the Ethnographic Encounter:  Feminist Research and Racial Embodiment,” in Bridging Scholarship and Activism in a Globalized World: Rethinking Solidarities, Identities, Responsibilities, and Methodologies, Bernd Reiter and Ulrich Oslender, Editors.  (East Lansing: Michigan State University, January 2015), pp. 151-170.

“Black Women on the Edge: A Conversation on the Gendered Racial Struggle for Urban Land in Salvador, Brazil,” co-authored with Ana Cristina da Silva Caminha in Grabbing Back: Resistance Against the Global Land Grab, Alexander Reid Ross, Editor (Oakland: AK Press, June 2014), pp. 147-157.

Book Review: (Invited) Nina Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, for American Ethnologist, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2014), pp. 195-197.

Book Review: (Invited) Polly Wilding, Negotiating Boundaries: Gender, Violence and Transformation in Brazil, Gender and Development: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2013), pp. 417-419.

"State Violence and the Ethnographic Encounter: Feminist Research and Racial Embodiment," in Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond Disciplinary and National Boundaries, Robert L. Adams Jr., Editor. (New York: Routledge, April 2013).

"The Case for Collaborative Research in Latin America: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, y Puerto Rico," co-authored with Joanne Rappaport in Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics, Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen (eds.). (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, May 2013), pp. 30-48.

“Hacia una pedagogía feminista negra en Brasil: Conocimientos de las mujeres negras en los movimientos comunitarios,” in Pedagogías decoloniales: Prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y (re)vivir, Catherine Walsh, Editor. (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, December 2013), pp. 255-274.

Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (October 1, 2013, University of Minnesota Press).

Book review: Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2012), pp. 370-373.

Choice book reviews: Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán, Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina's Music Scene (March 2012); Anne Enke, Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond transgender and gender studies (December 2012); A. Kim Clark, Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador: Modernizing Women, Modernizing the State, 1895-1950 (March 2013).

"State Violence and the Ethnographic Encounter: Feminist Research and Racial Embodiment," in African and Black Diaspora Studies: An International Journal, Volume 5, Number 1 (2012), pp. 135-154.

"The Black Movement's 'Foot Soldiers': Grassroots Feminism and Neighborhood Struggles in Brazil," in Politics Cultures Identities: Comparative Perspectives on Afro Latin America, Kwame Dixon and John Burdick, Editors, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, February 2012), pp. 219-240.

"Margin of the Margins" in Salvador, Brazil: Black Women Confront the Racial Logic of Spatial Exclusion," in Rethinking Global Urbanism: Comparative Insights from Secondary Cities, Xiangming Chen and Ahmed Kanna (eds), (New York: Routledge, April 2012), pp. 230-247.

"Espaço Urbano e Memoria Coletiva: O Conhecimento de Mulheres Negras em Lutas Políticas [Urban Space and Collective Memory: Black Women's Knowledge in Political Struggles]," in Questões urbanas e racismo, Renato Emerson dos Santos, Editor, (Brasília: Brazilian Association of Black Researchers, May 2012), pp. 164-215 (In English and Portuguese).

Book review: (Invited) Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, Vol. 68. No. 2 (2011), pp. 278-280.

Book review: (Invited) Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 12, No's 3& 4 (2010), pp. 522-523.

" 'Margin of the Margins' in Brazil: Black Women Confront the Racial Logic of Spatial Exclusion," Inaugural Working Papers Series, Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College, Volume 1, Number 5 (2009).

"'If We Didn't Have Water': Black Women's Struggle for Urban Land Rights in Brazil," in Environmental Justice, Volume 2, Number 1 (2009), pp. 9-13.

"'The Groundings With My Sisters': Toward a Black Diasporic Feminist Agenda in the Americas," in Barnard Center for Research on Women The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 7.2, Spring 2009.

"Racialized History and Urban Politics: Black Women's Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles" in Brazil's New Racial Politics, Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell, Editors, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, October 2009), pp. 141-164.

Book review: (Invited) Michael A. Gomez, Diasporic Africa: A Reader in The Black Scholar, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2008), pp. 72-73.

"'Daqui não saio, daqui ninguém me tira': Poder e Política na Gamboa de Baixo, Salvador da Bahia ['I will not leave here, no one will take me away from here': Power and Politics in Gamboa de Baixo, Salvador da Bahia]," co-authored with Ana Cristina da Silva Caminha in Revista Gênero, Volume 9, Number 1 (2008), pp. 127-153.

"Politics is uma Coisinha de Mulher (a Woman's Thing): Black Women's Leadership in Neighborhood Movements in Brazil" in Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy, Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Glen David Kuecker, Editors, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, April 2008), pp. 197-211.

Book review: Kia Lilly Caldwell, Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity in Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2007), pp. 526-529.

"Por uma pedagogia feminista negra no Brasil: O aprendizado das mulheres negras em movimentos comunitários [Toward a Black Feminist Pedagogy in Brazil: Black Women's Knowledge in Community Movements]" in Maria Lúcia Rodrigues Muller, Lea Pinheiro Paixão, Editors. Educação, diferenças e desigualdades, 1st Edition. Cuiabá, Brazil: EdUFMT (2006), pp. 161-184 (In Portuguese).

Book review: (Invited) Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism in Cultural Analysis, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. R1-R3.

"Social Memory and Black Resistance: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil," in The Latin Americanist, Volume 49, Number 1 (2005), pp. 811-831. *This article is The Latin Americanist's top downloaded article from their 2005 list of publications.

"The Roots of Black Resistance: Race, Gender and the Struggle for Urban Land Rights in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil," in Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 6 (2004), pp. 7-38.

 

2019 Howard R. Swearer Engaged Faculty Award for Research

Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, "Evictions and Convictions: The Gendered Racial Violence of Black Dispossession in New York City," 2016-2017, ($1750).

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, "Afro-Brazil in the Black Diaspora Lecture Series," 2016-2017, ($10,000).

Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, "Feminist Research, Engendering Blackness, and the Impact of Police Militarization," 2015, ($2000).

National Women's Studies Association 2014 Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize

Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University, “Transnational Feminist Political Thought and Praxis in Brazil,” 2014-2015, ($15,000).

Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, “Engendering Governance and Grassroots Activism in Jamaica,” Summer 2014, ($5000).

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brazil Initiative Grant, Brown University, “The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas," 2014-2015 ($2000).

National Women's Studies Association First Book Prize Finalist, Fall 2012

Brown in Translation Award, Spring 2012

Funds for Internationalizing the Curriculum, "Race, Rights and Rebellion Seminar" and "Black Women and the Struggle for Land Rights in Colombia and Brazil Symposium," Brown University, Spring 2011 ($4000).

The C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, "Transnational Feminism and the Black Diaspora Symposium," Brown University, November 2009 ($3500).

Future of Minority Studies – Mellon Fellowship, Cornell University, July-August 2008.

Africana Research Center Post-doctoral Fellowship, Penn State University, 2007-2008.

Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship in Anthropology, Smith College, 2005-2006.

Mendenhall Dissertation Fellowship, Smith College, 2004-2005.

Carter G. Woodson Fellowship, University of Virginia (declined), 2004-2006.

Graduate Outreach Fellowship, Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2004.

J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship (Brazil), 2003.

National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, 2002-2003 ($15000).

Summer Institute on Scholarship, Black Womyn and Africana Studies - Ford Foundation Fellowship, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 2002.

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2000-2002.

15. David Bruton, Jr. Graduate Fellowship, Office of Graduate Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2000-2002.

Debra J. Herring Endowed Memorial Fellowship, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2000-2001 ($5000).

Woman of Distinction Alumna Award, Georgetown University Women's Center 10th Anniversary Celebration, 2000.

Liberal Arts Graduate Fellowship, Office of Graduate Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1999.

Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers Summer Internship Program, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, 1998.

Georgetown University Scholarship, 1994-1998.

American Anthropological Association

American Political Science Association
Association of Black Anthropologists
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Association of Portuguese Anthropology
Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
Brazilian Studies Association
Caribbean Studies Association
Latin American Studies Association
National Women's Studies Association
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology

Undergraduate Lecture Courses and Seminars:

Activist Scholarship: Research for Social Change

Introduction to Africana Studies

Narrating the Radical Self

Race, Rights and Rebellion

Racial and Gender Politics in Contemporary Brazil

Theorizing the Black Diaspora

Black Women's Political Autobiography

Race, Gender, and Urban Politics

Urban Anthropology

Graduate Seminars:
Africana Studies and Interdisciplinarity
Theorizing the Black Diaspora

Black Transnational Feminisms