

Thu, Mar 27
|Arts Building, Room 160
Anthropology Speaker Series: Marta-Laura Haynes
Dept. of Anthropology, John Jay College (CUNY)
Time & Location
Mar 27, 2025, 12:30 p.m.
Arts Building, Room 160, 853 Rue Sherbrooke O, Montréal, QC H3A 0G4, Canada
About the event
Please join us for a talk by Dr. Marta-Laura Haynes (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY): https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/marta-laura-haynes-nee-suska.
Fearing the Mangue: Contaminated Landscapes and Politics of Trust in Recife
Co-sponsored with the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID).
Abstract:
In Brazil’s precarious socio-political landscape, where systemic violence, racism, and historical inequalities converge, trust emerges as a fragile yet pivotal axis in the interactions between police and civilians. Drawing from over six years of ethnographic research in Recife and Rio de Janeiro, my book Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil interrogates the intricate dynamics of trust and its cultural, gendered, and racialized dimensions. Focusing on a chapter that examines Recife’s favelas and development projects in the urban mangroves, this talk will explore how these contaminated landscapes serve as an extension of the Black body. In a city divided into wet and dry, contaminated and pure, Black and white, the racialization of nature is a lingering legacy of tropical medicine and hygienization that continues to shape public policy and policing. By positioning the mangroves as a site of mistrust and radical possibility, this talk interrogates how the intertwined processes of environmental and racial marginalization impact sociality and policing. Ultimately, untrusting becomes a lens to rethink security and democracy as sites of both exclusion and care.
For more information: https://www.mcgill.ca/anthropology/channels/event/anthropology-speaker-series-marta-laura-haynes-362507