Biography

My dissertation is an ethnographic and community-engaged study investigating the impacts of state violence on black women and communities in Brazil and Colombia. Centering the grassroots leadership of Black women, I examine how they organize and resist the myriad forms of state oppression that intersect and interact in their everyday lives. I use a framework of intimacy as a way to understand Black women’s political thinking and action by articulating how intimacy and activism intersect, through emotions, grief, homes as organizing sites, and the politicization of motherhood and care. In centering the leadership of Black women in Brazil and Colombia, my dissertation will contribute to literature on race and politics, feminist theory and African diaspora studies by examining how Black women are creating networks of support and autonomous organizing by leading movements that resist systems responsible for the violence against themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on 18 months of qualitative, ethnographic, participatory, and Black feminist research, I not only explore these movements’ use of a framework of intimacy to understand state violence, but also examine the extent to which their collective repertoires of contention are also rooted in (re)claiming and (re)creating autonomous Black intimate spheres and practices.