O seminário GI Diversidades, no dia 13 de abril, quinta-feira, contará com a presença de Julie Soleil Archambault (Concordia University e Visiting Researcher no ICS-ULisboa). A investigadora irá apresentar e discutir o tema: "Só porque somos: health, urbanisation, and rights claiming in Southern Mozambique".

O evento será presencial, na sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa.
 

Sumário da apresentação:

In Mozambique, growing concerns around overweight and obesity have inspired scores of people to start exercising. In this paper I attend to the part urbanisation plays in this changing landscape, not only as a factor behind the so-called ‘epidemiological transition’, nor as a mere infrastructural backdrop, as much of this exercising takes place outdoors in public spaces, but also as a material process that participates in the formation of emergent subjectivities. I argue that by taking to the streets to exercise, fitness enthusiasts are not only transforming their bodies but also their relationship with the state. Through a focus on Só Porque Somos, a community fitness organisation, and its response to the government’s efforts at policing its activities, I show how ‘health’ is mobilised to justify infractions and, ultimately, to claim a right to the city which, in a country where demonstrations have been violently repressed, can be a particularly high-stake endeavour. Locating the discussion at the intersection of critical global health studies and the anthropology of urban Africa, I approach the political potential of these new forms of biosociality as shaped by the very materiality of the city.  
 
Sobre Julie Soleil Archambault:

Julie Soleil Archambault is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and co-editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. Her work is based on ethnographic research in southern Mozambique and focuses on themes of intimacy, suburbanisation, affect, and embodiment. Cutting across much of her research is an interest in how materiality and temporality intersect in the crafting of lives worth living. She is the author of Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique (2017) and her recent work has been published in American Ethnologist, Journal of Southern African Studies, Critique of Anthropology, and City & Society. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at ICS-ULisboa and working on a book project on emerging workout ethics and the cultural politics of sweat in Mozambique.