Activities

“Sharbaka” is a kind of rhythmic clapping historically practiced by pearl divers in the Gulf region. The music emerges through a feeling of deep attunement to bodies in movement. Yet, it is also a word used to describe the feeling of entanglement in Arabic.

How might Sharbaka’s meanings inspire us to pay attention to a dual sense of entanglement/attunement as we emerge together from this global pandemic?

This exhibition, Sharbaka, features five artists whose works serve as archives of the United Arab Emirates, exploring themes of gender, globalization, capitalism, mobility and migration. Taken together, these archives illuminate the forms of entanglement and attunement that constitute the global flows of capital, ideas, and people within the Gulf, through the Indian Ocean and East Africa, and across the Arab region.

Sharbaka is conceived as a processual exhibition in which the art unfolds through a range of conversations that bring together the arts and social sciences: programs, workshops, and talks that take place through the New York University Global Network. The exhibition space becomes a portal through which to enter and move rather than marking the final destination.

How might we feel our way as we cross this threshold? How do we reconnect with our bodies and with one another as we emerge? What kind of conversations will we have along the way?

Clap. Clap.

About the workshop instructor

Ghazi Al-Mulaifi is applied-ethnomusicologist and assistant professor of music, Al-Mulaifi is also a Venice Biennale artist, composer, Khaleeji-jazz musician, and ensemble leader. His research interests include Kuwaiti pearl diving music, the music of the Indian Ocean civilizations trade routes, global-jazz, and heritage production. His current musical efforts include performing with his ensemble Boom.Diwan where he and traditional Kuwaiti pearl diving musicians merge Kuwaiti bahri (sea) rhythms with global jazz traditions for the purpose of creating a new Kuwaiti music and engaging in a global musical dialogue.

What relationship to laborious productivity—personal or national—do we expect an Arab artist to claim? In the postcolonial context of Arab countries in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, an aesthetic of roughly elaborated self-expression often reigned supreme. Guided by theories of decolonization and modern psychology, many artists performed a supposedly authentic relationship between self and production by means of apparently effortless automatic sketches and intuitive compositions. By contrast, artists who opted to create highly elaborated forms with experimental materials often seemed to slip outside official projects of subject formation in the period. Anneka Lenssen shares her new research tracking a figure she proposes to designate a “tinkerer,” meaning an artist who works in a labor-intensive experimental manner. Appearing in many ways opposed to national developmentalist sensibilities, the ambivalent figure of the tinkerer is most commonly associated in the Arab art archive with women artists, aristocratic artists, and/or design entrepreneurs who apply art to non-artistic ends. Why, and with what impact on methods and historiography? As part of a moderated discussion of narratives around laborious production in art, we consider the work of artists Celine Chalem, Nadia Saikali, Saloua Raouda Choucair, and Najat Makki. All these women trained and exhibited in international settings and multiple languages. The conversation pays particularly close attention to descriptions and attitudes appearing in Arabic-language materials.

About the speaker

Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018) and author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020), which won the Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is currently an art editor for the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory (Duke University Press). Here at NYU Abu Dhabi, she is a Senior Fellow (Spring '22) in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World and a member of the Advisory Board to al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art.

As part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Haraka Lab’s exhibition Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement features the work of artist Vikram Divecha titled Veedu (“house” in Malayalam), an inquiry into the structures that some migrants design and build in anticipation of their eventual return to India. The film documents the experience of a Keralite migrant family residing in Sharjah as members negotiate the ideals of an aspirational future home in Kerala. Divecha’s work, part of an ongoing project, unravels how negotiations over the house’s AutoCAD design are shaped by the complex intersections of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and migration.

Back to the Drawing Board is a program designed to engage Vikram Divecha in a public conversation with Surabhi Sharma (Film), George Jose (Anthropology), Gayatri Gopinath (Gender Studies) and Deepak Unnikrishnan (Literature). The conversation takes the form of an ‘open critique’ in which reflections and questions are shared with the artist as he reconsiders this work and how he would like to develop it further. Through this exchange, the artist goes back to the drawing board, both literally - as one would when designing a house - and metaphorically for this project. By centring process in this interdisciplinary exchange, Sharbaka: Enganglement/Attunement aims to be a place in which artistic work gets reinvented and reconfigured rather than simply shown and disseminated. 

About the speakers

Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha is an artist based in Dubai. His practice raises questions about time, value, and authorship by engaging people across urban and social spheres, and working with available material and space. Divecha terms this approach as ‘found processes’, which often sees him intervene within public and social systems. From wholesale exporters to municipal gardeners, architectural consultants to railway traffic managers, Divecha’s participants inform and shape his projects in various ways, at times for sustained durations. These attempts translate into public art, site-specific interventions, workshops, installations, moving images, paintings, surfaces, drawings, photographs, performances and text.

Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.

Deepak ഉണ്ണികൃഷ്ണന്‍ is a writer from Abu Dhabi. His book Temporary People, a work of fiction about Gulf narratives steeped in Malayalee and South Asian lingo, won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Hindu Prize, and the Moore Prize.

Why did the relatively similar states of Bahrain and Kuwait adopt differing foreign policies in the early years of their independence? While Kuwait adopted an actively pan-Arab, progressive and anticolonial foreign policy, Bahrain shied away from Third World politics and eagerly engaged with Western powers. Wafa Alsayed argues that the difference between Bahrain and Kuwait’s foreign policy behaviors resulted from these countries’ respective processes of state formation, which led to the emergence of divergent identities. Rarely has the literature on the international relations of the Gulf states engaged with their domestic processes, tracing the relationship between the local and the global. This plurilogue seeks to illustrate how the material and ideational domestic structures that emerged throughout each country’s history played an instrumental role in shaping their foreign policies. Additionally, this conversation demonstrates how local sources, which have been neglected in Gulf international relations, are instrumental in tracing the interplay between the domestic and the international. These archival material include official government publications, local periodicals, textbooks, memoires, and literary works. Such sources allow recovering ideational trends at the official and popular levels, while also providing an alternative perspective to the Western archives. 

About the speaker

Wafa Alsayed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gulf University for Science and Technology (GUST) in Kuwait. She obtained her PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2020, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University. Alsayed previously worked as a Research Analyst at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and as an Investigative Assistant for the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI).

As part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Haraka Lab’s exhibition Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement features a student panel of four NYUAD alumni majoring in SRPP – Nandini Kochar, Sobha Gadi, Laura Assanmal and Lubnah Ansari – responding to the themes of artist Alaa Edris’s video artwork School featured in the exhibition, hosted in 19WSN.

Moderated by Kaashif Hajee, this discussion explores the panelists’ lived experiences with education and the constant processes of learning and unlearning. Through reflections on individual journeys, the panel unpacks questions of power, positionality, and process in educational institutions.

About the Artist

Alaa Edris uses photography, film and performance to enact experimental mappings and manipulations of her social and urban environment. Acting as anthropologist, cartographer and sci-fi voyager, she contends with dominant issues from the field of Arab artistic research, including the construction of gender, the relationship between tradition and progress, and language as a medium for identifying, shaping and articulating a culture. Born in Sharjah, Edris currently lives and works between Sharjah and Abu Dhabi.

About the Moderator

Kaashif Hajee graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2021 with a double-major in Social Research and Public Policy and Film and New Media. For his capstone, Kaashif wrote, directed, and edited a short narrative film titled Gair, which follows an Indian teenager and a Pakistani taxi driver in Abu Dhabi. At NYU Abu Dhabi, Kaashif wrote extensively about issues of social justice and Eurocentrism in the curriculum for The Gazelle, which he eventually led as co-Editor-in-Chief. An aspiring journalist, filmmaker and reluctant anthropologist, Kaashif wants to study Hindu nationalism and its effects on minorities and cultural production in India. Currently, he is working as a Research Assistant to Dr. May Al-Dabbagh at Haraka Experimental Lab in the NYUAD Social Science Department. He calls Bombay home.

About the Panelists

Nandini Kochar is an NYU Abu Dhabi Alumna who graduated with a double-degree in Social Research and Public Policy and Film and New Media in 2021. During her time at NYU Abu Dhabi, Nandini extensively studied and documented the migrant experience in the UAE, with a particular focus on expanding and problematizing reductive dominant narratives. She founded Humans of Abu Dhabi and served as UAE Columnist for The Gazelle. Her work has featured in The National and she was a recipient of the 2020 Shukran Cultural Appreciation Award. Nandini's capstone documentary explored the intersections of leisure, labor, and love in the lives of migrant mothers in Abu Dhabi. She is presently pursuing a fellowship with Teach For India, where she teaches 67 students in the 10th grade in a low-income public school in Bombay. 

Lubnah Ansari dissects notions of personal and political questions with fervent curiosity. Utilizing her multidisciplinary skills, the artist and researcher engages with Hindu-Muslim households using feminist ethnographic frameworks. The NYU Abu Dhabi graduate has immersed herself in the roles of both the insider and the outsider, which gives her work a refreshing angle that urges you to tap into your compassion. She is currently part of The Assembly at Jameel Arts Center and is a post-graduate research fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Sobha Gadi is an MPhil student in Politics (Comparative Government) at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, with a primary research interest in the long-run political consequences of disruptive historical events. He also maintains an interest in the study of political violence and ethnic politics. Sobha’s previous research has focused on the impact of sectarian violence on electoral outcomes for sectarian parties. He has also worked on a project investigating the relationship between democracy and violence, and on a project investigating nativist populism. His work is supported by the Clarendon Scholarship and a Nuffield College Award. Prior to his time at Nuffield College, Sobha majored in Social Research and Public Policy at NYU Abu Dhabi. 

Born and raised in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and an aspiring New Yorker, Laura Assanmal graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2021 with a degree in Social Research & Public Policy, and is now pursuing a PhD in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt. During her time as an undergraduate, Laura engaged with on-campus ongoing efforts for consent education, facilitated interfaith and intercultural dialogue as part of NYUAD’s office of Spiritual Life and Intercultural Education, and served as co-Editor-in-Chief of The Gazelle, where she wrote extensively about consent, intimacy, and issues of income and class. As a culmination of her work, Laura’s capstone centered the experiences of survivors of sexual harm at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she explored how they conceptualize justice and accountability through interview-based qualitative work.  She currently dwells on issues of research ethics, participatory action research, restorative justice, sexual and intimate violence, Title IX, and non-carceral responses to sexual harm.

As part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Haraka Lab’s exhibition Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement features the work of artist Ala Younis titled Ajman Independent Studios. Culled from her larger work, Drachmas (2018), Ajman Independent Studios is a photographic archive of the first studio set up in the UAE’s northern emirate Ajman. The studio has produced several Arabic language television series since its founding in 1975. Dramas and crime thrillers such as No Dear Daughter, Uncle Hamza, and A Storm of Events were famously produced for a pan-Arab audience. The studio, effectively a company town, included members of cast, crew, and cooks from across the Arab world, including Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, and Yemen. Younis’s archive illuminates the Gulf as a migratory destination, a node in the region’s creative industry, and a central hub for the production of transnational Arab culture. 

About the speaker

Best known for her projects informed by extensive research, Ala Younis has explored the formation of the modern Arab world and the potential for renewed thought and action that the era continues to inspire. She examines major issues of the modern day—nationalism, social movements, the emergence of global capital and personal and collective loss—through a multiplicity of voices. She moves through history by studying traces of everyday objects, recurring images and routine practices. Rather than focusing on the perspectives of a singular leader or a spectacular event, Younis offers an in-depth understanding of an era that at times resembles our own. She is an artist with curatorial, film and publishing projects, as well as research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi. Ala is currently co-head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, co-curator of Singapore Biennale 2022, and co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta.

About the moderator

Ban Kattan is a research associate at Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought. Her areas of research interest cover issues of human and institutional capacity building, sustainable development, gender equality, as well as Arab art and culture. Ban holds a BSc in business administration from the American University of Sharjah, a BA in gender and women studies from York University, Canada, and an MA in development studies from York University focusing on organizational capacity building via knowledge transfer. Ban specializes in translation practices for art and culture organizations in the Middle East, and is a certified translator by the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario, Canada.

As part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Haraka Lab’s exhibition Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement features the work of artist Vikram Divecha titled Veedu (“house” in Malayalam), an inquiry into the structures that some migrants design and build in anticipation of their eventual return to India. The film documents the experience of a Keralite migrant family residing in Sharjah as members negotiate the ideals of an aspirational future home in Kerala. Divecha’s work, part of an ongoing project, unravels how negotiations over the house’s AutoCAD design are shaped by the complex intersections of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and migration.

Back to the Drawing Board is a program designed to engage Vikram Divecha in a public conversation with Surabhi Sharma (Film), George Jose (Anthropology), Gayatri Gopinath (Gender Studies) and Deepak Unnikrishnan (Literature). The conversation takes the form of an ‘open critique’ in which reflections and questions are shared with the artist as he reconsiders this work and how he would like to develop it further. Through this exchange, the artist goes back to the drawing board, both literally — as one would when designing a house — and metaphorically for this project. By centring process in this interdisciplinary exchange, Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement aims to be a place in which artistic work gets reinvented and reconfigured rather than simply shown and disseminated. 

About the speakers

Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha is an artist based in Dubai. His practice raises questions about time, value, and authorship by engaging people across urban and social spheres, and working with available material and space. Divecha terms this approach as ‘found processes’, which often sees him intervene within public and social systems. From wholesale exporters to municipal gardeners, architectural consultants to railway traffic managers, Divecha’s participants inform and shape his projects in various ways, at times for sustained durations. These attempts translate into public art, site-specific interventions, workshops, installations, moving images, paintings, surfaces, drawings, photographs, performances and text.

Surabhi Sharma has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, and migration. Her works have been screened at International Film Festivals like Dubai International Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, and MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, amongst others. She has also created video installations that have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016). Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane 2016; Eco-Cinema, Greece 2003 (The Ramsar-Medwet Award), Film South Asia, Kathmandu 2001; Karachi Film Festival 2002; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires 2002. Surabhi is currently teaching and the Program Head, Film and NewMedia at New York University Abu Dhabi.

George Jose is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology in NYU Abu Dhabi. He was Dean of the Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS University, Mumbai; Program Director for Asia Society India; Program Executive with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bengaluru; and was Research Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. He has directed programs in the field of arts and culture for international and regional organizations, and has taught in architecture, design, and management institutes. George maintains a strong interest in art practice across disciplines, and serves collaborative projects in an advisory capacity.

Speaker - May Al-Dabbagh

Participants - Nidhi Mahajan, Laure Assaf, and Rana Al-Mutawa

About Theorizing Up

Theorizing Up is a series of conversational social science talks about what it means to engage with theory in academic research on the Gulf. Hosted by Haraka Experimental Lab, this series features five ethnographic projects on the UAE covering topics such as labor, impermanence, belonging, authenticity, and mobility. The authors reflect on their process and share ideas that correspond to the themes of the Sharbaka exhibition.

About Plurilogue Talks

Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides, is based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic, English, and other languages. Plurilogue Talks is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research for 15 minutes followed by introductions/ interventions by attendees. The discussion is modeled around a moderated dialogical exchange that allows the audience to engage their own work in the process. All participants are required to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation.

Speaker - Nidhi Mahajan

Moderator - May Al-Dabbagh

Participant - Laure Assaf

About Theorizing Up

Theorizing Up is a series of conversational social science talks about what it means to engage with theory in academic research on the Gulf. Hosted by Haraka Experimental Lab, this series features five ethnographic projects on the UAE covering topics such as labor, impermanence, belonging, authenticity, and mobility. The authors reflect on their process and share ideas that correspond to the themes of the Sharbaka exhibition.

About Plurilogue Talks

Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides, is based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic, English, and other languages. Plurilogue Talks is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research for 15 minutes followed by introductions/ interventions by attendees. The discussion is modeled around a moderated dialogical exchange that allows the audience to engage their own work in the process. All participants are required to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation.

Speaker - Rana Al-Mutawa 

Moderator - May Al-Dabbagh

Participants - John O'Brien and Laure Assaf 

About Theorizing Up

Theorizing Up is a series of conversational social science talks about what it means to engage with theory in academic research on the Gulf. Hosted by Haraka Experimental Lab, this series features five ethnographic projects on the UAE covering topics such as labor, impermanence, belonging, authenticity, and mobility. The authors reflect on their process and share ideas that correspond to the themes of the Sharbaka exhibition.

About Plurilogue Talks

Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides, is based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic, English, and other languages. Plurilogue Talks is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research for 15 minutes followed by introductions/ interventions by attendees. The discussion is modeled around a moderated dialogical exchange that allows the audience to engage their own work in the process. All participants are required to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation.

Speaker -  Laure Assaf

Moderator - May Al-Dabbagh

Participants - John O'Brien 

About Theorizing Up

Theorizing Up is a series of conversational social science talks about what it means to engage with theory in academic research on the Gulf. Hosted by Haraka Experimental Lab, this series features five ethnographic projects on the UAE covering topics such as labor, impermanence, belonging, authenticity, and mobility. The authors reflect on their process and share ideas that correspond to the themes of the Sharbaka exhibition.

About Plurilogue Talks

Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides, is based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic, English, and other languages. Plurilogue Talks is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research for 15 minutes followed by introductions/ interventions by attendees. The discussion is modeled around a moderated dialogical exchange that allows the audience to engage their own work in the process. All participants are required to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation.

Speaker - John O'Brien

Moderator - May Al-Dabbagh

Participants - Laure Assaf and Rana Al-Mutawa

About Theorizing Up

Theorizing Up is a series of conversational social science talks about what it means to engage with theory in academic research on the Gulf. Hosted by Haraka Experimental Lab, this series features five ethnographic projects on the UAE covering topics such as labor, impermanence, belonging, authenticity, and mobility. The authors reflect on their process and share ideas that correspond to the themes of the Sharbaka exhibition.

About Plurilogue Talks

Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides, is based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic, English, and other languages. Plurilogue Talks is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research for 15 minutes followed by introductions/ interventions by attendees. The discussion is modeled around a moderated dialogical exchange that allows the audience to engage their own work in the process. All participants are required to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation.

Academic critiques of manufactured Gulf heritage focus on the privileging of certain practices and traditions by national narratives. In much of these critiques, “Arab” is constructed as a category that is contrasted with others (A’imi, South Asian, and African). Yet, what kinds of alternative conceptualization might we gain by paying close attention to musical practices such as pearl diving music? How do khaleeji musicians understand the contemporary appropriation of their culture, and how does the transnational history of their practice resist ossification or erasure? Ghazi Al-Mulafi will share his experience researching and playing Bahri music in Kuwait. Through a moderated discussion around pearl diving music practice and history, this conversation explores the possibility that knowing and belonging are embodied practices rather than fixed identity categories. 

About the speaker

Ghazi Al-Mulaifi is an applied-ethnomusicologist and professor of music who earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in Music from New York University (2015). Al- Mulaifi is also a Venice Biennale artist, composer, global jazz musician, and ensemble leader. His research interests include Kuwaiti pearl diving music and global jazz. He currently leads his collaborative ensemble Boom.Diwan, where he and traditional Kuwaiti musicians dialogue Kuwaiti bahri (sea) music with global jazz traditions for the purpose of creating a new Kuwaiti music that revives a musical tradition of dialogue and exchange.

Global South is a polysemic concept. The term has many origins, related meanings and developments. Accordingly, it has to be understood in relation to distinct, and very often, unrelated, political, economic, intellectual, and historical contexts. The general assumption is that the idea evolved from the late 1970s discussion around questions of global economic disparities, organized by the United Nations. This is certainly one of the origins of a concept that has other latitudes related to alternative political and intellectual engagements that encompass ideas of otherness related to local histories of social thought.

What are the local histories of the concept of ‘South’ in the Gulf region? How can this concept help us explore the intellectual connections between the Gulf and Latin America for critically addressing modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and challenging the limitations imposed by area studies frameworks, without engaging with the overdetermined idea of ‘de-colonization’? The so-called ‘Southern turn’ has been gaining a momentum. Although motivated by the larger agenda of the postcolonial debate, it proposes different disciplinary engagements to address the challenges of relevance, representation, and positionality within which societies have been struggling in recent decades. This talk is an invitation for a collaborative discussion around the latitudes of the South as resourceful concept to connect knowledge production in the Gulf and in Latin America.

About the speaker

Cláudio Costa Pinheiro is Professor of Asian and African Studies at the Institute of History, Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil, and the Chairman of Sephis Programme (South-South Exchange Programme for the Research on the History of Development). His research agenda covers knowledge production and circulation, structures of power, and slavery and forms of dependency, both observing the impact and durable effects of colonialism in the institutionalization of power in Western and non-Western societies. His teaching agenda includes theoretical challenges to international social theory by incorporating contributions from the Global South into the cannon. In recent years, his works moved from a purely theoretical discussion to the construction of intellectual interventions through teaching, which include research on the history of social theory teaching and the development of critical tools to reinforce diversity through pedagogical routines.