The Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University presents the Digital Brazil Project,a multimedia amplifier of Brazilian culture, thought, and social action. Through exclusive virtual content featuring scholars, activists, and cultural producers, the Digital Brazil Project seeks to expand accessibility to Brazilian Studies for the SDSU community and beyond.
Virtual Lectures
Fall 2022:
Davi Kopenawa Yanomamiat the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies
In Fall 2022, the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies in collaboration with the Instituto Socioambiental, the Hutukara Associação Yanomami, the Environmental Defense Fund, and American Indian Studies at SDSU welcomed Davi Kopenawa Yanomami for a virtual lecture. Davi Kopenawa Yanomami is a shaman and spokesperson for the Yanomami people, one of the largest relatively isolated tribes living in the Amazon forest on the border of Brazil and Venezuela. Davi is today a global ambassador for his people and one of the most eloquent and powerful voices speaking out against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its peoples. For over 25 years, he has tirelessly led the national and international campaign to secure Yanomami land rights for which he gained recognition around the world and in Brazil. The contiguous Yanomami territories in Brazil and Venezuela are the largest area of tropical rainforest managed by an Indigenous people in the world.
Quilombo
The Quilombo Space is a showcase of independent artists and cultural producers from Brazil’s urban periphery. In Brazil, the quilombo was a maroon community where formerly enslaved Africans and their descendents settled, and forged a new society, resisting their exploitation and dehumanization. Today, the term quilombo symbolizes hope, solidarity, freedom, and autonomy for subaltern peoples of Brazil and around the world. Quilombo Space has a new host Tedson Souza, Black journalist, Researcher, and university of Ouro Preto professor born in the city of Salvador, Bahia. Doctor and Master in Anthropology from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), with a doctoral internship at Brown University, in the United States. Join the performers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists Tedson is bringing to our Quilombo.
Art Space
|DES|CENTRAL brings together a contemporary panorama of photographers from various parts of Brazil. The exhibition resignifies the anthropological approach of foreign, Eurocentric observation by turning to the artist's everyday environment, intimately revealing each place that they propose to photograph, carefully exploring a poetic reality. It is a close look at action in space imbued with their personal cultures.
|DES|CENTRAL
Community Reporting
As part of our commitment to diversifying the voices represented in English-language media on Brazil, the Community Reporting Initiative features reporters and stories from urban neighborhoods in some of the country’s major metropolitan areas.
Reporting Highlight:
Collaboration with RioOnWatch
