ICF Research Seminar

Institute for Creative Futures

Join us for the next ICF Research Seminar at LUL University with Dr Gislene Moreira Gomes and Luiz Ribeiro Fonseca.

Loughborough University London

Join us for the next Instute for Creative Futures Research Seminar at Loughborough University London. We are welcoming Dr Gislene Moreira Gomes, postdoctoral fellow in Communication and Territories at FLACSO-Mexico and UERJ, alongside ICF PhD researcher Luiz Ribeiro Fonseca. The session will explore themes of energy transition, socio-environmental resistance, memory, sound, and ecological justice through interdisciplinary and decolonial perspectives. Please find the speakers’ bios and presentation abstracts below.The session will start at 1pm and take place in room LDN.3.12. Gislene Moreira Gomes is a postdoctoral fellow in Communication and Territories at FLACSO-Mexico and UERJ. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences and a Master’s degree in Culture and Society. Her doctoral thesis Las Hormigas de Macondo: Counter-hegemony and Communication Policies in Latin America (2011) was awarded by CLACSO/ALAS as one of the best academic works of the year. In 2024, she was a visiting professor at the CiEGS – Centre for Research and Gender Studies at UNAM, Mexico.She coordinates the Observatory of Socio-Environmental Conflicts of the Chapada Diamantina (OCA), where she works with more than 150 traditional communities affected by large-scale energy and mining projects in the north-eastern Brazilian semi-arid region. She places her faith in science and the arts—such as theatre and literature—and in educommunication as strategies for defending the biocultural heritage of these territories and for building new imaginaries and narratives of the future.Academically, her most significant work is the book Sertões Contemporâneos: Rupturas e Continuidades (2018), in which she discusses social, political, cultural and communicative transformations in the semi-arid region. Her inner child, Mô Moreira, signs the literary works Munturo (2022), in which she retells the history of the sertões from women’s perspectives, and The Adventures of Chicó (2024), a children’s and young adult book addressing socio-environmental conflicts. As an independent future project, she coordinates Alegria Rancho-Escola, an initiative focused on agroecology and outdoor environmental education. She is the mother of Francisco and Luísa.AbstractOiá’s War – Culture, Communication and Energy Transition in the Contemporary SertõesIn Afro-Brazilian mythology, Oiá is the mistress of winds and storms. This research proposal invokes the strength of this female archetype to discuss the resistance of rural women in Brazil’s sertões in the face of the advance of green capitalism in Bahia. The result of more than ten years of fieldwork, the study reflects on the relationships between culture, communication and energy in the struggle over imaginaries of the future in the semi-arid region.In the face of the harmful impacts of hegemonic projects, the initiative highlights how ancestry and memory form part of the narratives used to defend the biocultural heritage of these body-territories. The study brings together multidisciplinary perspectives, including Political Ecology, Ecofeminism, Community Communication, Social Psychology, and Cultural and Decolonial Studies.Inspired by the energy of the “storm-women” who move the world of life in defence of their right to exist, this text seeks to renew thinking about the energy transition. It points to the resilience and resistance of the north-eastern semi-arid region and its ancestral peoples as alternative pathways for addressing the challenges of a more just, equal and democratic ecological transition.---Luiz Ribeiro Fonseca is a Brazilian sound artist and journalist. Doctoral researcher at the Institute for Creative Futures - Loughborough University London and a Techne DTP scholarship holder, he investigates sonic practices in Brazilian ecological activism, questioning how sound making can intertwine climate collapse with colonialist, capitalist, and techno-scientific ideals. His master’s thesis (supported by a cotutelle between Universidade Federal Fluminense and University of Tübingen) investigated the transformations of maracatu – an Afro-Brazilian cultural expression – in the Brazilian music industry in the first half of the twentieth century. He produces the podcast Talking to Those Who Listen, based on interviews with sound scholars.AbstractOn 5 November 2015, in what was described as the biggest environmental catastrophe in Brazilian history, the collapse of the Fundão Dam spread approximately 62 million m³ of mining waste into the Doce River, devastated the villages of Paracatu de Baixo and Bento Rodrigues, killed 19 people, caused the mass death of fish and travelled more than 600 km until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Healing Sounds (2022-), a performance by Shirley Krenak (2025), and the documentary Saudades do Rio Doce (“Missing Doce River”, in English), released in 2025 by Claudia Neubern, depict different standpoints of this human and more-than-human trauma. Although the visuality of the Fundão episode has been widely explored, the sonic aspects of it remain dismissed; for that reason, the presentation will reflect upon the networks of oppression built through sound. The suffocated protests against mining multinationals, the civil defence sirens, and the ongoing noise of the trains that keep carrying iron to the ports engulf both narratives.

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