Friday, 4/11/2025
EAAD - Campus de Azurém - Museu
As part of Plan A of the PhD in Architecture,
2024/2025 edition, Class #08 of the Advanced Knowledge Seminar, titled “The
lines that April did not blur: territory, housing and racial violence”, will
take place on April 11 at 2pm at the EAAD Museum, and will be given by Ana Rita
Alves.
Synopsis | bell hooks tells us in 1990 - from the
lived experience of black people - how the home is a place of organization and
solidarity, refuge, subversion and struggle, a space where “everything that
really matters” takes shape (hooks, 2015). Therefore, the fall of a house, the
destruction of a neighborhood - through rehousing or, in its most violent form,
eviction - can represent a hecatomb, implying the dispossession of families,
(forced) displacement and the erasure of a “(black) sense of place”
(Mckittrick, 2011). Amid the rubble, memory and solidarity. This session will
seek to analyze and debate the intersection between territory, housing and
racial violence in April Portugal through the analysis of legislation and public
policies and the insurgency of black people, Roma and migrants based on the
sometimes repeated gesture of (re)building a house and (re)designing a
neighborhood.
Bio | Ana Rita Alves is an anthropologist and PhD in
Human Rights in Contemporary Societies (UC), with the thesis “Beyond Loss:
Race, Displacement and the Political”. She is currently a researcher on the
project “Generating Bodies: from Aggression to Insurgency. Contributions to a
Decolonial Pedagogy” (CeiED - Lusófona University) and a collaborating
researcher at the Center for Social Studies (UC). Over the last decade, Ana
Rita has produced critical knowledge on institutional racism, public policies,
territory, housing and political violence in Portugal, in dialogue with
residents and collectives from self-produced and rehoused neighborhoods. She is
the author of the book “Quando ninguém podia ficar: racismo, habitação e
território” (When nobody could stay: racism, housing and territory) (Tigre de
Papel, 2021).
