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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic experiences with Brazilian migrants in Athens, this research inhabits the space between "the said and the unsaid", precarity and narrative trauma, reframing ethnographic knowledge through poetic writing as an ethical practice.

Paper long abstract

I have lived migratory experiences shaped by affective, geographical, and identity-based dimensions that have placed me in the position of a “mediator between worlds.” This stems largely from narrating the worlds I come from while listening to those I am gradually approaching, preserving the differences between them. By assuming this stance as an epistemological one, I am developing a doctoral research in Anthropology entitled Between Worlds: The Anthropologist as Mediator, through which I seek to mediate perceptions of the experiences of Brazilians who migrated to Greece throughout the twentieth centuries.

To this end, I employ the lyric essay—drawing on feminist critiques of science (Haraway, 1988; Collins, 1986)—as a method for engaging with narratives that exceed the analytical dimension of history. I work at the boundary between “the said and the unsaid”, interweaving literary language, ethnographies of the particular, Brazilian social phenomena, and contemporary global issues. Through scenes and poetic-essayistic passages, I demonstrate how mediation itself becomes an object of ethnographic knowledge, while simultaneously testing limits through rhythm, imagery, textual fragmentation, and the effects potentially generated in readers. I use this ethnographic writing as a way of approaching the precarity and uncertainty of migratory narratives.

Finally, throughout this research, the lyric essay emerges as the materialization of “listening between the lines” and as an ethical tool in the fictionalization of accounts of profound and indescribable trauma, enabling the inhabitation of these spaces while preserving their ambiguities, contradictions, and inquietudes as sites of anthropological knowledge production.