For at least four decades, feminist researchers have been questioning science, laying the foundations for a critique that is proving increasingly fundamental and urgent. In a political and scientific landscape that is becoming ever more arid, tense, and hostile to the struggles for transformation and social justice, it is with great joy and enthusiasm that we present this series of four posts written by Brazilian feminist anthropologists and intended for academic readers specialising in STS, as well as for readers in broader feminist networks and activist/grassroots communities.
The Latin American Network of Feminist Anthropology of Science and Technology (RAFeCT) is a collective of Latin American researchers, activists, and professionals committed to disseminating feminist and intersectional perspectives. Our network is a space for welcoming, exchanging knowledge, and connecting academia, social movements, and other fields of knowledge. We engage in science and technology studies from a partial, situated, intersectional, ethical, and responsible perspective, focusing on promoting social justice, gender equity, and the fight against structural oppression. We are guided by principles of creativity, affection, and care, cultivating critical feminist theories and actions that are trans-inclusive, anti-racist, decolonial, anti-ableist, anti-LGBTQIAPN+phobia, and anti-capitalist.
The network began developing in 2023, during meetings at the XIV Mercosur Anthropology Meeting (RAM, Brazil) and the IX Meeting on Anthropology of Science and Technology (ReACT, Brazil). The desire to establish the network is rooted in the fact that our field of activity in Latin America is highly masculine and hostile, despite feminist and women’s work being fundamental to its foundations. We understand that academia as a whole remains harmful to some researchers and certain research topics. We also recognize that anthropology’s hegemonic heterocisnormativity limits its creativity. We are many, diverse, and operate in different ways. Networking is essential to building bridges between feminist resistance within and outside academia, creating a space where we can denounce and combat various forms of oppression, such as sexism, racism, LGBTQIAPN+phobia, and others. We work to ensure that the voices, research, and experiences of women and gender nonconforming individuals, especially those in marginalized situations, are evoked, heard, and respected. Our actions are an important step toward transforming the academic and scientific field, making it more inclusive and committed to equity.
We are currently more than 28 study groups and laboratories, as well as 67 researchers, integrating disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, public health, computer science, arts, and with representatives from all regions of Brazil, as well as Argentina, Chile and Colombia. The network promotes spaces for conversation and support, organizing events, discussion groups, and seminars, while also strengthening the production and circulation of feminist knowledge. We hope to continue expanding our network, strengthening our ties with feminist social movements and other areas of activity, and consolidating our presence in strategic decision-making spaces, both within academia and beyond. We also aim to promote more events, publications, networking, and courses in graduate and undergraduate programs on the topics discussed and the theories that underpin feminist STS. We seek to influence public policy and transform the field of science and technology into a more welcoming and inclusive environment.
We believe in the flourishing of feminist science. One of our modest but significant steps toward this dream is the creation and maintenance of our blog, launched in May 2025 and involving the collaboration of anthropologists from the network. This initiative was inspired by Platypus’s accumulated experience in scientific dissemination. The space now hosts this specially prepared series for circulation among our colleagues at CASTAC. I, Clarissa Reche, curated this series. I am a contributing editor for Platypus and a member of RAFeCT. As a social scientist specialising in feminist STS, I am currently receiving a grant from a Brazilian government programme promoting and training science journalists. This grant enables me to work with the network on creating and maintaining digital infrastructure, including editing the RAFeCT blog.
In this series of four posts, we present a small sample of the work of Brazilian feminist anthropologists working in the field of anthropology of science and technology. Our intention is to open avenues for dialogue and exchange with other colleagues who struggle and research around the world, dreaming, like us, of a different kind of science. We are aware of the difficulties in circulating our work, which faces national and regional barriers, but these are incomparable to the enormous challenge of internationally circulating our scientific and intellectual output in the center of the world. Therefore, it is with great joy that we share our work — of which we are very proud for its quality and relevance — in this window to the world that is Platypus.
We open the series with a text by Ana Manoela Primo dos Santos Soares, an indigenous researcher from the Karipuna people and a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA, Brazil). The text chronicles her journey from childhood as the only Indigenous student in a private school in Belém (Pará, Brazil) to her academic and political development, influenced by her mother and grandmother, who preserved the language, history, and collective struggle of their people. Ana Manoela challenges the Western notion of “Indigenous feminism” and affirms the existence of a “mutirão de mulheres” (women’s collective effort, in a translation that diminishes the original power of the word “mutirão” – the term originates from the Tupi language, where “moty’rõ” signifies “common work” and is used to describe cases in which, for example, family and friends collaborate in the construction of a house or a collective community space). This collective practice also guides her anthropology.
Our second post is by Juliana Vieira, a PhD candidate in Public Health at the Hesio Cordeiro Institute of Social Medicine at UERJ (Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil). Juliana analyzes a 2016 uterus transplant case in Brazil, a pioneering use of an organ from a deceased donor with a successful pregnancy. Despite the potential to expand reproductive options, the procedure is expensive, non-vital, involves risks and immunosuppression, and its promotion may create new social demands aligned with the exclusive valorization of biological motherhood. Thus, the debate goes beyond technical advances, demanding reflection on the cultural and gender meanings of reproduction, and on how science, far from neutral, is shaped by values and perspectives that need to be questioned.
The result of a research, reading, and writing experiment with adolescents, our third post is written by Irene do Planalto Chemin, Geovana Luna dos Santos, Kauan Alves da Silveira Aristides, Raylane Souza de Moura, Samara Lopes de Oliveira, and Veronica Martins da Silva. Irene, a member of RAFeCT, is a master’s student in Scientific and Cultural Communication (Labjor/IEL, Unicamp, Brazil) and, during her research, worked alongside the other authors — adolescent researchers who were part of a scientific initiation program for high school students. The text presents the experience of reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in the context of producing a podcast on digital education, in which the cyborg figure serves as a metaphor for reflecting on the relationship between technology and youth. Haraway’s classic work is understood by teenagers as a political and critical genre that questions absolute truths and proposes the mixing of elements, influencing the way the group constructs their “cyborg writing” in the podcast — a space of collage, sound, and narrative that articulates science, fiction, and everyday experiences.
Concluding the series, our fourth post is written by Daniela Tonelli Manica, an anthropologist and researcher at the Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor, State University of Campinas, Brazil), and Fabiene Gama, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). In this text, the authors revisit the well-known case of Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, following his revelation since the accusations that surfaced following the publication of the book “Sexual Misconduct in Academia” in 2023. They summarize the main events since then, didactically organizing the regrettable way in which the intellectual responded to the accusations and systematically retaliated against the victims. We conclude our series with this counter-manual that touches anthropologically on the main structural problems of science: misogyny and racism, which feminist STS theory has long denounced.
You will be able to follow this series starting next month, September, with one post per month. The posts were curated especially for Platypus and its audience, and were published in English, Spanish and Portuguese on this blog and replicated in Portuguese on the RAFeCT blog. We hope this series will serve as a seed, germinate, and bear fruit alongside our colleagues at CASTAC. Here at RAFeCT, we are grateful for our partnership, and we welcome comparisons, solidarity and collaboration with feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) work in your own regions.
