Experience of an Afro-descendant woman: ethnography intertwined in times of floods in a remote municipality in Southern Bahia
environmental Sciences; Brazil; homeless; environmental disaster; small cities
Resumo do trabalho em Inglês (parágrafo único, até 500 palavras): Rapid climate change and disorderly urban growth anchored in the development discourse have modified the landscape of several Brazilian cities. Urban expansion has been ignoring the need for planning, disregarding natural aspects, leading populations and cities to suffer from problems resulting from extreme events, such as floods. Academic analyzes of floods are generally reported from a quantitative point of view, with indices and metrics. A systemic approach must include the human factor, subjectivities, and sense of belonging to an affected community. The narrative approach of those affected by environmental disasters provides the emergence of the human factor, rich in nuances for an ethnography of floods, especially when it is allowed to remove the mantle of historical erasure of black populations. These, in turn, are usually the hardest hit in environmental disasters, an extension of the historical racism that exists in Brazil. In December 2021, the municipality of Itororó suffered from severe flooding due to heavy rains that hit the southern region of Bahia. Given this, the present research aims to report the experience of an Afro-descendant woman, a resident of the municipality, who experienced this environmental disaster. The narrative brings observations and experiences from the victims’ point of view. An ethnographic and autoethnographic study will be carried out, with a historical and prospective survey, from September 2022 to November 2023. In addition to the personal narrative, the narrator will seek to enrich the study with data from the scientific literature, reports, images, and audiovisuals about the municipality’s flooding problem is an academic expression of the problem that will allow the visibility of a hidden and forgotten population, which is periodically afflicted by environmental disasters. The report intends to sensitize the academy to the environmental problems, their experiences, and their propositions, of forgotten and invisible communities, through a black female (written) voice. |