The desire to become an anthropologist came through a rather rough experience of being a teenager in a foreign country. My mother was doing a PhD in sociolinguistics at Brown University (USA) and I followed her in that adventure for three years. The public high school I attended had a large number of migrant and black students. We were separated in ethnic groups, which made me feel an outsider most of the times. Since then, racism became an issue I think about and fight against. I returned to Brazil with the certainty that I wanted to understand cultural differences and racial inequalities. I studied social sciences at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) where I obtained a research scholarship to work in medical anthropology. I focussed on religion and health. This became my main interest throughout my master and PhD, both focusing on religious experience in illness trajectories.
In 2009, I returned to UFBA, now as a Professor at the Institute of Collective Health, and it became clear that the Integrated Program Community, Family and Health (FASA) was the right place for me. During the past years, I have been researching the intersections between race, gender and social status and their impact on the production of social vulnerability and negligence in terms of health, with emphasis on the health of black population in Brazil. The life experiences of individuals living with Sickle Cell Disorder gave me a better understanding of the (re)production of racial inequities and institutional racism. It also gave me the opportunity to work in partnership, intense dialogue and joint effort between the university and social movements involved with this condition.
I continued to invest in community-based research with underrepresented minorities, such as the quilombola communities of Ilha de Maré. For the last three years, this experience led me to explore decolonial/postcolonial approaches to build a better understanding of environmental racism and its impact in life and health conditions.
Above all, I have been trying to frame my career through a combination of intellectual production and social commitment to social justice.
I am so motivated to be a member of the ECLIPSE family.