Vanbasten Noronha de Araújo

PhD Student

Email: vanbasten.dearaujo@mail.utoronto.ca

Areas of Interest

• Decolonial Science and Technology Studies
• Environmental Humanities
• Queer Ecologies
• Sexual and Reproductive Health
• Latin American Studies
• Brazilian Studies

Biography

Vanbasten de Araújo is a Brazilian scholar interested in decolonial science and technology studies in Latin America, especially in Brazil. His current PhD project focuses on how toxic matter affects the daily lives of humans and nonhumans, creating long-term health effects, particularly regarding their sexual and reproductive health. In his dissertation, he is interested in furthering the studies on ‘non-spectacular forms of contamination’ – an intoxication that does not happen through large-scale environmental disasters. He focuses on pesticides as the primary toxic matter for his research because of its particular way of infiltrating lives via the life-sustaining action of consuming and/or producing food and its relation to larger structures of inequalities. Through working with pesticides, he also considers – from feminist and decolonial perspectives – issues of women’s labor in agriculture, food security, and the ‘biopolitics of toxicity’ under neoliberal economies. He sees in non-spectacular forms of contamination the opportunity to question how the understanding of toxicity in contemporary society has radically changed after infrastructural catastrophes such as Chernobyl, Love Canal, and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Considering modes through which matters of life and death have been mediated by technological advances in contemporary society, de Araujo is interested in the ways these catastrophic experiences frame policies and researches regarding other ‘less visible’ forms of intoxication.

Program: PhD 2020

Education

BA, International Relations, Universidade de Brasilia, Brasilia

MA, Critical Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest

Dissertation

Supervisor: Michelle Murphy

Presentations

Prismatic Ecologies of Death/Life: Plastic Pollution and the Death of Cup Corals
First Queer Death Studies International Conference – Karlstadt University, Sweden, November, 2019

Unsettling clinical encounters: the entanglement between bodies, affects, and pain in Fibromyalgia treatment Cultural Crossings of Care - University of Oslo, Norway, October, 2018

Selected Works

de Araújo, Vanbasten. 2019. Life without humankind – queer death/life, plastic pollution, and extinction in. Women, Gender & Research 49–61. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v28i2-3.116308

de Araújo, Vanbasten. 2019. Mother and Son Shared Pains – the entanglement between bodies, affects, and pain in Fibromyalgia treatment. Lova – Journal of Gender Studies and Feminist Anthropology. Issue 40 (1) pp. 29-47.

Honours and Awards