Image: Daniel Nascimento e Silva
ReDICo is glad to announce a guest lecture by Prof. Daniel Nascimento e Silva (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil) at the University of Potsdam on October 17 from 12:45 to 1:45 p.m..
Literacies of survival: The creative use of language and technologies by Rio de Janeiro favela activists in resisting (in)securitization
This guest lecture draws from my ongoing ethnography with activists (teachers, students, artists, journalists, and human rights defenders) in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Favelas are neighborhoods built by residents, and they were first formed by former enslaved people and their descendants who were not afforded housing or labor policies following the end of the longest and largest slavery regime of European colonialism. Today, despite having the lowest Human Development Index in the city (0.711) and disproportionately fewer public services such as schools and health care facilities, Complexo do Alemão is a site of intense artistic activity, political organization, and production of solutions for everyday life. I discuss here activists’ strategic engagement with literacies of survival, that is, the contextual use of resources and technologies of writing for creatively grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade – including anti-Black racism and aggressive policing – and pursuing redress of longstanding inequities. Analytically, I build a case study unpacking communicative strategies and reflexive semiotic models enacted by participants of Faveladoc, a grassroots documentary-making workshop that I attended in 2021. I examine how a group of majorly Black participants engaged with digital literacies to grapple with a shootout that broke out during a meeting. I discuss the role of local (digital) literacy practices and a situated literacy event in rendering uncertainty into a backdrop from which modes of reorienting knowledge, building socialites, and pursuing resources could emerge. Through further enacting a distributed embodiment – collective commitments beyond a bounded body – participants facilitated hope as a creative and action-oriented affect that has had political impacts for peripheries.
If you’d like to attend, please send a message to redico at uni-potsdam.de