Departmental Lecturer in Social and Medical Anthropology
Bio
I am a social anthropologist who grew up in the Pampa biome in South America and was trained in Brazil (PPGAS/UFRGS) and France (LAS/EHESS). I began my professional career as an Associate Professor of Anthropology of Health (UFCSPA) in 2014, in Brazil, and moved to the UK after being awarded the Newton International Fellowship by the Newton Fund and the British Academy in 2018. I still have an institutional attachment to the Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAS/UFRGS) in Brazil, as a Collaborating Professor.
Research Interests
Throughout my career, I have been working with Indigenous Peoples in Lowland South America, especially with the Guarani-Mbyá collectives in the Brazilian far south and Argentina. I am enthusiastic about in-depth, implicated, and long-term ethnographic fieldwork and advocate for grounded ethnographic theories that pay serious attention to what matters for those we establish relations with as anthropologists.
I am interested in conceptions of person, body, health, life, kinship, and care relations from a cross-cultural and comparative approach. (Re)production and debates related to the Anthropocene, encompassing themes such as embodied health inequalities, medicalisation of childbirth and its connections to environmental devastation, are among the themes I am currently addressing in my manuscripts. My most recent project examines how vital bodily substances and toxic substances, such as pesticides and mercury, intertwine in shaping Indigenous conceptions of reproduction and kinship relations. Collaborative research methods that capture the feedback loops between environmental devastation and health inequalities across diverse spatial and temporal scales are also part of my current interests.
My current projects are focused on i) long-covid and the “white diseases” in the Anthropocene (Brazil), and ii) Indigenous women, (re)production, climate change, pollution and extractivism (Argentina, Brazil and Peru).
Some recent academic contributions
