Banca de DEFESA: KARINA DE PAULA CARVALHO

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : KARINA DE PAULA CARVALHO
DATE: 17/12/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Sala de defesa CPDA
TITLE:

THIS IS WHAT CHANGES: PRODUCING FOOD SOVEREIGNTY GOES BEYOND PLANTING.

KEY WORDS:

Food Sovereignty; Food Justice; Food Distribution; Agroecology; Black Women in Favelas.

PAGES: 324
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Sociologia
SUBÁREA: Outras Sociologias Específicas
SUMMARY:

This study analyzed the strategies developed by the women of the Centro de Integração da Serra da Misericórdia (CEM) in constructing food sovereignty amid the ethnic-racial and gender injustices experienced in the Terra Prometida favela, located in the Complexo da Penha (Rio de Janeiro). Through field research, it aimed to understand the issues and strategies mobilized by this collective, interpreted here as efforts to ensure access to “real food” and to build sovereignty as an instrument capable of contesting multiple injustices. In a territory marked by the presence of drug trafficking, militia groups, mining activities, institutional violence, and the collective desire to “green” the area through Favela-Based Agroecological Urban Agriculture, among other intertwined challenges, the analysis focused on how notions of sovereignty and justice are mobilized and enacted in the daily practices of Black women who seek to live, plant, and harvest within the favela. The research followed these women as they appropriated such notions as inseparable principles- naming injustices and empowering their actions both within and beyond their territory. It discusses how popular experiences of solidarity-based food distribution, as in the case of CEM, can be understood as concrete expressions of food justice promotion, as they demand not only physical and economic access to food, but also rights and autonomy beyond planting. Here, these practices are translated as “food sovereignty beyond planting” and “justice in harvesting and eating.” This conception expands the analytical scope of these notions through an antiracist and antisexist lens of justice, incorporating the political emancipation of Black women from the favela. Inspired by intersectional and crossroads epistemologies that shape community dynamics and by the protagonism of these women in particular, these experiences are shown to destabilize the productivist and market-oriented rationality sustaining the dominant food system. They resonate with the redistribution-recognition perspective, aiming to abolish or at least mitigate arbitrary inequalities -so that different social groups may have equitable access to real food and live with dignity. Simultaneously, these practices strengthen collective capacities for decision-making and action around food. Ultimately, the exceptional experiences of the Mulheres em Ação collective at CEM are understood here as strategies of justice enacted through shared práxis - realized in the construction of community and affective food networks, autonomous management of backyards and gardens, solidarity kitchen, and the Popular School of Agroecology. Thus, their practices are not merely emergency responses to hunger but rather trenches of resistance and re-signification, transforming a territory marked by violence into one of good living (bem viver). Through the pursuit of “food free from violence,” these women challenge both organized crime and the State - as well as Agroecology itself and public policies- inviting us to rethink how the human right to food can be guaranteed through the lenses of racial, gender, and territorial justice.

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - ***.064.218-** - RENATO SERGIO JAMIL MALUF - UFRRJ
Interna - 1432841 - CLAUDIA JOB SCHMITT
Interna - 1091123 - SILVIA APARECIDA ZIMMERMANN
Externa à Instituição - RUTE RAMOS DA SILVA COSTA - UFRJ
Externo à Instituição - MARCELO FIRPO DE SOUZA PORTO - FIOCRUZ