The first session of the Advanced Studies Seminar – Conference Series will take place on November 11, with Jean Segata (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). The theme of this opening session will be Genetic taming, subtle extinctions, and the narrowing of Multispecies Futures in Southern Brazil. In the Maria de Sousa Room at ICS-ULisboa, starting at 10:30 a.m. See the full seminar schedule.

This seminar examines the transformations in the relations between humans, cattle, and the environment in the southern grasslands of Brazil, with a focus on the consolidation of British taurine breeds such as Angus, valued for their beef quality. The success of this breed in the tropics is the outcome of a prolonged process of genetic enhancement that brings together advanced biotechnologies, precise zootechnical management, local knowledge, and socio-environmental memory. More recently, the incorporation of genomics and mating algorithms has reshaped cattle breeding, altering temporalities, bodies, and reproductive functions. This technological arrangement, however, generates ambivalent effects: on the one hand, it reinforces genetic flows and positions Brazilian Angus as a distinct lineage within global beef markets; on the other, it contributes to the narrowing of multispecies futures, in which places such as the southern Brazilian grasslands become not only sites of innovation but also stages for a silent drama, where criollo breeds deemed economically inefficient vanish along with knowledges, traditions, and ways of life discontinued in the name of market-oriented modernisation.