Congratulations to Shelly Annette Biesel, who successfully defended her dissertation on March 24th, 2023! Dr. Biesel is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in environmental anthropology and member of the Brazil Natural Resource Governance Initiative (BNGRI). She has more than 10 years of experience working on collaborative, community-based, ethnographic research and applied projects. Her dissertation is titled: “Confronting Legacies of Loss: Negotiating Intergenerational Inequalities in Afro-Brazilian Traditional Communities”.
Dr. Biesel’s dissertation explores the impacts of Brazil's national infrastructure development program, the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC, in Portuguese), on Afro-descendent coastal communities in Pernambuco, Brazil. Her research shows that the program has led to widespread dispossession, environmental devastation, and depression in these communities, who are regularly expropriated for development initiatives due to their lack of formal land rights. She sheds light on how the violent expulsion of over 26,000 residents from Cabo and Ipojuca, both in Pernambuco, by the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS, in Portuguese) is linked to centuries of racial land tenure arrangements that systematically exclude Afro-descendant communities from land use and ownership. Her study further highlights the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation, particularly on Afro-descendent women. She shows how the loss of livelihoods, ecological knowledge, and more-than-human kinship contributes to the disempowerment and emotional distress of traditional communities.
Source: Shelly Biesel personal archive.
Despite these challenges, Dr. Biesel finds that many communities from Cabo and Ipojuca exhibit remarkable resilience and strength. Some engage in community organizing, while others draw upon regional identity and cultural traditions to create moments of joy amidst structural hardship. She concludes that understanding the profound and uneven consequences of economic development requires consideration of the articulation of development agendas with colonial histories, intersectional inequalities, and socio-ecological relations, particularly in marginalized communities.