CADS Research Seminar
Cheia de Axé (Full of Axé): Spirituality, Resistance, and Repair in Pernambuco’s Afro-Brazilian Traditional Communities
- Date
- Monday 15 December 2025
- Time
- Location
-
FSW building
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 5A42
This talk draws on ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2018 and 2021 in the coastal municipalities of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, Brazil, where Afro-Brazilian communities face ongoing displacement linked to the expansion of the Suape Port Industrial Complex. Combining insights from political ecology and Black feminist theory, Dr. Biesel examines how contemporary development projects reproduce racialized land dispossession rooted in Brazil’s plantation past. At the same time, the talk explores how local communities respond through spiritual practices, ecological care, and ancestral epistemologies that challenge extractive state logics. Drawing from two recent publications, the presentation traces the entanglements of land, race, and cosmology in the struggle over territory and recognition. Rather than framing these communities solely as victims of structural violence, the talk foregrounds how they cultivate refusal, repair, and alternative futures. It invites reflection on what it means to contest development not only politically, but ontologically.
About Shelly Biesel
Shelly Annette Biesel is postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University—where she collaborates on the ERC-funded project Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change. As part of a comparative, multi-sited team, she explores how community-based climate infrastructures reshape socio-political relations and environmental governance across comparative contexts in the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States.