Date:
For a recording of this event, click here.
Speakers: Joaze Bernardino-Costa, Professor of Sociology, Universidade de Brasília; Creuza Maria de Oliveira, President, Sindoméstico, the domestic workers' union of Bahia, Former Coordinator, FENATRAD; Luiza Batista Pereira, Coordinator, Federação Nacional das Trabalhadoras Domésticas (FENATRAD); Meg Weeks, PhD candidate in History, Harvard
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, Chair, Department of History; David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
This event will feature the participation of two major leaders from Brazil's domestic-worker movement, which dates back to 1936 with the founding of the first professional association in Santos. Moderated by Professor of History and African and African American Studies Sidney Chalhoub, the event will also include Professor Joaze Bernardino-Costa, a sociologist who researches the domestic-worker movement in Brazil. The panelists will discuss the major triumphs and challenges of their social movement over the past four decades, including legislative efforts to expand labor rights for the sector, alliance-building with Afro-Brazilian organizations, feminists, and the labor movement, and the place of the domestic worker in the Brazilian popular imaginary. Prof. Bernardino-Costa and Meg Weeks, a PhD candidate in History at Harvard, will also discuss a project they are coordinating through UCLA's Modern Endangered Archive Program to preserve, catalog, and digitize the archival collection of FENATRAD.
Joaze Bernardino-Costa is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Brasília. Graduated in Social Sciences (1995), Master's in Sociology (1999) and PhD in Sociology (2007) from the University of Brasília. He did his postdoctoral work at the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (2014-2015), where he developed the project “Pensamento Caliban no Brasil: Black Intellectuals and the Field of Racial Relations in the Light of Decolonial Theories.” He served as a Visiting Researcher (2017) at the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS – Rutgers University), where he furthered his studies on Black Caribbean intellectuals. He was part of the team at the University of Brasília that prepared and proposed the Affirmative Action Policy for Black, Indigenous and Quilombola Students in Postgraduate Courses, approved in 2020. He is currently the President of the Commission for Monitoring the Affirmative Action Policy in Graduate Studies. He is currently part of an international research network on racialization practices and the promotion of racial equality in Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Sweden. He teaches and advises undergraduate, masters and doctoral students on the following topics: decolonial theories, postcolonialism, black intellectuals, diaspora theories, affirmative action, domestic work.
Luiza Batista Pereira is a retired domestic worker. Besides her position as Coordinator for the National Federation of Domestic Workers (FENATRAD), she is also Director of Pernambuco´s chapter of the United Central Union of Workers (CUT); Director of the National Confederation of Commerce and Service Workers (CONTRACS); Administrative Director of Pernambuco´s chapter of the Union for Domestic Workers (SINDOMESTICAS); and General Coordinator of the National Council for Domestic Workers (CNTD).
Meg Weeks is a PhD candidate in history, with a secondary field in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is a 2011 magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, where she wrote a prize-winning honors thesis on political organizing and government policy in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Her research interests include race, gender, labor, and social movements in twentieth-century Latin America, particularly in urban Brazil. Her dissertation focuses on grassroots activism among sex workers and domestic laborers during Brazil's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. She is also a Portuguese translator and writes widely about art and politics in Latin America, with publications in a number of non-academic journals including Two Lines, Frieze, Artforum, n+1, Revista Rosa, and piauí. Her annotated translation of the memoir of Gabriela Leite, the founder of Brazil's sex-worker movement, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.
Presented in collaboration with the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, FENATRAD and Programa de Pós Graduação em Sociologia, Universidade de Brasília