Presentation short abstract

My PhD fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon explores climate injustices through workshops with frontline collectives. We examined issues affecting our bodies and territories, challenging binaries such as Global North/South, while co-producing critical perspectives on climate coloniality and justice.

Presentation long abstract

As part of my PhD thesis in sociology, currently being written, I here present reflections on my fieldwork that took place in October 2023 in different territories of Pará, the Brazilian Amazon. Through collaborative workshops with a youth collective and a Quilombola community, who are among the most affected by climate injustices in the country, we exchanged knowledge on environmental racism, LGBTQIAPNB+ lives and epistemological inequalities that shape our different social-environmental conditions. We problematised mainstream constructions on inequalities which disregard complexity and diversity, such as terms like Global North/South, and looked into the multiple scales of capitalist extractivism onto territories and bodies of those most affected by climate coloniality, trying to evidence the interdependencies among these scales.

As a student engaged in the principles of action research, I implicate myself in the research, making contradictions and confrontations emerging from the field visible, including privileges, limitations and responsibilities I embody throughout fieldwork, as a Brazilian person who is member of the German academia. I also highlight our workshop debates on how extractive knowledge appropriation works in the political economy of knowledge production, especially on climate issues, which is mainly dominated by the Euro-US academia globally, and the Southeast of Brazil in specific, and cis-upper class-white-hetero led institutions overall. The workshops constitute my methodological-ethical approach, in which I elaborate how the meeting of differently situated onto-epistemologies dialogue and learn with each other, all the while conserving a relational ethics of care to research participants and the territories we were in.