School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies (UoE) and co-director of the Race.ED Network. My academic background started at the Black Consciousness Organisation (Núcleo de Consciência Negra na USP - NCN-USP), an NGO founded by the Black Movement in Brazil that offered free preparatory courses to enter university, in 2002. From the antiracist curriculum developed by NCN-USP, I could engage with important references and activism that shape and inspire my teaching and research projects to this day and start university with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to make sure I could keep studying in the first year of the programme in Sociology and Politics. 

In 2007 I was awarded my BA in Sociology and Politics from the Foundation-School of Sociology and Politics of Sao Paulo (FESPSP) with an anthropological dissertation discussing racialised sexual-affective encounters and racism in samba parties in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I found my passion in developing ethnographic work and understanding how we build and validate knowledge through research. I graduated in the Master programme of Sociological Research from the University of Barcelona, a programme grounded in methodology and new approaches to Sociology when I discussed racialisation, affect and love, whiteness and coloniality in relationships between women who love women or self-identified lesbians. I studied my PhD at the University of Leeds, when I researched the affective economy present in the diasporic experience of Black Brazilian women weaving their possibilities to make a home in the UK and negotiate their meaning of Blackness with the colonial British setting. My research projects are now interested in exchanging knowledge and generating dialogues from transnational antiracist solidarity. 

My experience with Education is from interdisciplinary perspectives, having taught people as young as 2 months old to adults over 90 years old involving music, Human Rights, adults' literacy, horse-riding and sexual health. All these national and international experiences set the path for me to work with the intersections of racialisation politics and race, multiple constructions of gender, formations of nation and nationality, migration, Black diaspora, discourse and affective economy. My background is rooted in the Black Movement in Brazil, samba community and quilombo territory. I believe in the transformative power of education to create means to organise and develop strategies for promoting social justice and societies with loving, ethical and liberating experiences.

Publications

Bento, K. 2021. Colonial legacies and refusal in women’s networks: Edinburgh Gifford Lectures Final Response. Edinburgh Gifford Lectures Blog. Available from: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/gifford-lectures/2021/10/24/final-series-respons…;

Bento, K; Ruiz Ponce, H; Sempertegui, A.; Di Paolo, L. 2019. Descolonizando el Norte Global: Dialogos sobre Afro-Latinoamérica, el Caribe y Abya Yala en diáspora. In: Alternautas - (Re)Searching Development: The Abya Yala Chapter. (Online Journal). Available from: http://www.alternautas.net/.

Bento, K. 2017. Weaving Brazilian Blackness in the United Kingdom: Nation, Race and Migration. Graduate Journal of Social Science. October 2017, Vol. 13 (1), pp. 17–36. Available from: >https://goo.gl/fkTmNn

Bento, K. and Beresford, J. 2017.Affirmative Actions for Indigenous Peoples in Brazilian Universities and Ethnology Studies from a Dialogical Perspective: An Interview with Clarice Cohn. Graduate Journal of Social Science. October 2017, Vol. 13 (1), pp. 37–47. Available from: https://goo.gl/Yq7Sz4

Bento, K. 2016. “Invasoras” do Reino Unido: Reenquadrando discursos de colonialidade nas vozes de mulheres negras brasileiras imigrantes. Ponto-e-Vírgula : Revista de Ciências Sociais, [S.l.], n. 18, pp. 21-28. Available from: https://goo.gl/9s8P6Q

Bento, K. 2015. Por mais andares sem vergonha, por mais vadias: Sobre o amor e a agencia na terceira onda do feminismo negro e o corpo das pretinhas! 21 October. Blogueiras Negras [online]. Available from: https://goo.gl/2wbTRV

Bento, K. 2015. O Feminismo Negro de Viola Davis não será minado pela branquidade. 8 October. Blogueiras Negras [online]. Available from: https://goo.gl/FbLhVj

Perotto, L., Leiria, V., Hostensky, Bento, K., E. Rothestein, P. 2015. Associação de Estudantes Estrangeiros Para Quê? – Uma reflexão crítica sobre a representação estudantil em tempos de crise. Passages de Paris. 10 (1), pp. 12-33.