Beatriz Vianna de Araujo Cintra

Engaging planetary activist collectives: Prefiguring the pluriverse

Could digital platforms offer possibilities for a prefigurative politics of the pluriverse? My research engages with planetary activist collectives (PACs) and how they leverage digital platforms to foster collaboration across varied themes, territories and cultures. I'm interested in how they negotiate practices across cosmologies and reconcile place-based causes with cohesiveness at the global scale.

I'll also investigate the role played by digital technologies themselves, surfacing digital ontologies, power structures, affordances and limitations. Alongside a doctoral thesis, the output will be a design workbook for activists and designers. The aim is to consolidate, into actionable tools, research findings and insights from speculative workshops with PACs, ensuring knowledge transfer beyond academia.

Supervisors

• Prof Alex Wilkie
• Dr Michael Guggenheim

Researcher Biography

Hello! I'm a Brazilian researcher, visual thinker and socio-ecological justice advocate based in London. Since 2018, I've been working with/for collectives based in the Brazilian Amazon and the Atlantic Forest to advance socio-ecological justice for all beings. This journey started when I co-founded the award-winning social innovation project “A Casa de Acai”: engaging undergraduate architecture students and local Amazonian youth and children, it proposed circular economy solutions for housing in Eastern Amazonia. Among its prizes was the 4th Instituto Tomie Ohtake Design Award (2021), followed by an exhibition at the museum.

My professional experience is varied, spanning communications, design, illustration, research, and consultancy. Roles include Social Project Articulator at Kyvo Design-Driven Innovation, editor for the book series From Indigenous Territories to Markets (Forest Trends) and Associate Consultant at The Alliance for the Amazon and Beyond (Gaia Foundation), where I supported Brazilian grassroots movements to advance climate justice and uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

I hold a Bachelor’s degree (Hons.) in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP) and an MA (1:1) in Ecology, Culture and Society from Goldsmiths University. My master’s dissertation examined how Western discourses have historically framed Amazonia as a specific kind of Nature, and how this materially affects its peoples.

My artistic vein is kept alive through the visual translation of narratives, notebooks, embroidery on paper and the sensitive representation of field activities and ethnographic research.