Katucha Bento

Dr Katucha Bento is Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies in the Dept of Sociology and the Associate Director of RACE.ED Network. Her work is grounded in Black Feminisms (Latinx, Caribbean, African, US, and UK) situating Critical Race Studies and Decoloniality as she navigates topics around affect economy, diaspora, womanhood, Blackness and community building. Katucha is the co-founder of the Free Afro-Brazilian University (UNAFRO), a university committed to building decolonial pedagogies and conversations that promote social justice to all people.  Katucha’s research interests include:

• Intersections of racialisation politics and race
• Multiples constructions of gender
• Formations of nation and nationality
• Migration
• Black diaspora
• Discourse and Rhetoric Studies
• Anti-racist Pedagogies
• Education
• Killjoy Feminists
• Love, Affect and the Body
• Audre Lorde
• Lelia Gonzalez.

Her current projects include:

• The impact of Covid-19 in public Brazilian HEIs. This discusses the intersectional challenges of staff, scholars and students, revealing a code of symbolic life and death of how human order organises itself through the coloniality of power/being. 
• R-Existence and Healing in Brazilian rural community: Weaving solidarity during the pandemic. The project comes as a consequence of the project in HEIs to address how marginalised rural communities are developing strategies of survival during Covid-19 pandemic.​ This project will work with the matriarchal non-hierarchical community Ylê Asé de Yansã, situated in Araras (Brazil), aiming to address hunger issues by restoring the food-growing community garden, and sharing knowledge with local and global organisations about possible paths to achieve agroecological solutions for food sovereignty. Growing food and disseminating related knowledge is part of sustainable strategies of healing, i.e., recovering from the trauma of experiencing not only hunger but also racism and land expropriation that rural communities like YAY are facing now in Brazil. 

Katucha’s recent outputs include:

• Bento, K. “The hysteria of a little flue”: effects of COVID-19 on HEIs in Brazil. High Educ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00887-9
• Bento, K. (Accepted/In press). Herstories: Unfolding diasporic narratives of intersectional oppressions. In K. Crenshaw , D. Carbado, K. Andrews, & A. Wilson (Eds.), Blackness at the Intersection - Blackness in Britain Zed Books.
• Bento, K., Sempértegui, A., Ruiz Ponce, H., & Di Paolo, L. (2019). Dialogues of Indigenous Afro-Latinxs (re)existence: Possible decolonialities. Alternautas, 6(1), 33-55. http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2019/4/9/dialogues-of-indigenous-afro-latinxs-reexistence-possible-decolonialities
• Bento, K., & Beresford, J. (2017). Affirmative actions for Indigenous Peoples in Brazilian universities and ethnology studies from a dialogical perspective: An interview with Clarice Cohn. The Graduate Journal of Social Science , 13(1), 37–47. https://goo.gl/Yq7Sz4