CEH is pleased to welcome Ginevra Carbone who will be with us from August to mid-October this semester after having earned her MA degree in Cultural Anthropology from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. During her visit, Ginevra will be developing a PhD project proposal on the reorganisation practices and strategies of waste pickers in southern Brazil in response to the floods that recently have devastated the region and exacerbated their social vulnerability.

Ginevra’s research is framed within the theoretical context of the current era as a polycrisis. Her proposed PhD project aims to explore the resistance strategies employed by vulnerable social groups following environmental disasters that aggravate their precarity. In Brazil, despite public policies over the past two decades aimed at formalising waste pickers (pt. catadores), these workers continue to experience extreme social vulnerability. In Porto Alegre, since 2022, nearly all seventeen formal waste pickers' cooperatives have been facing the risk of closure, returning to a state of full precariousness. The severe floods of April 2024 in the state of Rio Grande do Sul have devastated the area and triggered a cascade of crises, including job and housing insecurity, epidemics, and migration.

This situation, integral to debates on Environmental Justice and the Environmentalism of the Poor, has disproportionately affected vulnerable populations, and widened social disparities. Through the anthropological lens, Ginevra's analysis of the waste pickers’ modalities to face, manage, and respond to the severe floods aims to provide insights into potential local polysolutions, such as effective strategies that local communities can adopt in current and future environmental disasters.