Our International Visiting Research Fellow: Dr Flavia Meireles (CEFET-RJ Brazil) will be presenting a seminar at City Campus, Grand Parade – G4.

This CTSG seminar explores the case of street slam poetry “Slam das Minas RJ”, a gathering of queer/BIPOC for a playful slam poetry competition downtown Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The event is held with the purpose of making a safe space for gender/sexual non-conforming people and to make room for their lives/experiences through spoken word. The collective creates powerful activist/artistic practices that intertwine the political environment and resist from extreme far-right wing politics in Brazil.

We will examine their context of emergence, their artistic/activist practices considering, as we learn from Audre Lorde that “poetry is not a luxury” but “a vital necessity of our experience” (LORDE, 1977). We will also highlight afrofuturist, queerlombo thinking (queer + quilombo), fugitive routes and other movements of imagining/materializing more inclusive (and liveable) activism/artistic practices. We will further develop and associate their artistic practices/contexts to understand how far these intersected living queer/BIPOC lives can go in the direction of dismantling white supremacy to create more inclusive (and liveable) activism/artistic (and academic) practices.