Julia's work investigates how joyful collective life is maintained within and against extractive relations/structures.
Julia F. Sauma (she/her) is a Brazilian-Londoner and deaf/Hard of Hearing researcher who investigates how collective life is maintained within and against extractive relations, structures and institutions in Brazil and the UK.
She is currently working with Amazonian Quilombo (Maroon) activists and families in Brazil to create interventions in and reflections about the different kinds of work involved in maintaining joyful collective refuges. Julia’s auto-ethnographic work explores diasporic experience, what listening means for D/deaf and Hard of Hearing people, and the impact this could have on research practice and in academic institutions.
Julia’s work investigates themes such as ecology, land rights and demarcation, childhood, education, race, ethnicity, myth, memory, kinship, gender, disability, healing and the body, translation and the place of miscommunication and disagreement in the making of collective knowledge.
Academic qualifications
PhD in Anthropology, University College London 2014
MA in Social Anthropology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro 2007
Teaching and supervision
I teach the compulsory undergraduate modules Approaches to Contemporary Anthropology (year 1) and Critical Ecologies (year 2).
I supervise or have supervised PhD projects on a range of different topics, including (but not limited to) ecology, climate change, being human, embodiment, race, gender, disability, work, memory, martial arts. I am particularly interested in supervising multi-modal projects and/or projects in which the body is a key research tool.
As well as publishing academic and policy-oriented pieces, I explore what it means to be collective through performance, walks, chance creations and collaborations.
