Feeling, thinking, acting

The FMSH is hosting a meeting dedicated to showcasing the artistic and scientific achievements of women from the African diaspora.

Organised by Luana Antunes Costa, winner of the 2025 DEA programme, the meeting will bring together researchers, teachers and artists, who will be invited to engage in dialogue based on the presentation and dissemination of current research and works in the humanities and arts. These exchanges will focus on the scientific and artistic production of African women and creators from the diaspora. 

Feeling-thinking-acting has been a strategy for struggle, affirmation and preservation of life in Latin American territories. It is a way of affirming the political and symbiotic relationship between the body-territory, women's bodies, and the psychological and emotional bodies of every subject who inhabits — and is inhabited by — the Earth. This notion is at the heart of the struggles waged by community feminisms, black feminisms, and other social movements of women and their communities against coloniality, neocolonialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other hegemonic and predatory systems of the peoples of Abya Yala/Améfrique Ladine (Gonzalez, 1989).

The concept of sentipenser was proposed by Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda (2009) and places at the heart of critical and sociological theory a worldview rooted in popular knowledge, according to which emotion and reason coexist as the founding axes of the world's meanings. In dialogue with sentipenser, we bring into the arena of debate the thinking of Awa Thiam, a Senegalese anthropologist and feminist, taking the act of listening to the voices of African women as a radical method in favour of the lives of women and their communities, combining theoretical practice with action: ‘making speech effective’.

Driven by this momentum, as well as by other alternative proposals for shaping futures and transforming social reality, the event ‘Feel-think-act: meeting and debates on the poetics-politics of Afro-diasporic women’ aims to create a space for dialogue between researchers, teachers, artists from different geographical areas, and the public, based on the presentation and dissemination of current research and works in the humanities and arts devoted to the scientific and artistic production of black African women creators from the territories of the Diaspora. The event is linked to research conducted by Luana Antunes Costa, professor and Brazilian black feminist activist, as part of the ‘Associate Directors of Studies’ programme (DEA, 2025), one of whose objectives is to promote the circulation of ideas among Afro-diasporic intellectuals by highlighting their artistic and theoretical proposals and their contributions to the promotion of social justice on a global scale.

• Luana Antunes Costa has been a professor at the Institute of Languages and Literatures at the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB/CE) in Brazil since 2016, and is an activist in the Black Brazilian feminist movement. She is a founding member of the research group ‘Writing the Female Body’ (UFRJ/2015) and a researcher for the network research project ‘African Intellectuals: Conceptual Contributions of Dina Salustino, Paulina Chiziane and Akwaeke Emezi’ (CNPq/UNILAB). She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from the University of São Paulo (2014) and has also completed two post-doctorates, one at Crimic, Sorbonne University (2021-2022) and the other in Comparative Lusophone Literatures at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2015). Currently invited by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH) as Associate Director of Studies, Luana Antunes is developing her research on ‘Creolisation, creolities and other camouflages among Afro-diasporic women writers - A research project in Comparative Studies (Martinique and Cape Verde Islands)’ at the ‘Les Afriques dans le monde’ (Afrikas in the World) Laboratory (Sciences Po Bordeaux). She is also a visiting professor at Sciences Po-Bordeaux and head of the course ‘Epistemologies of North American Black Feminism and Feminismo negro-brasileiro’ (2025-26). 
• Maria Araujo da Silva has been a professor of Lusophone Studies at Sorbonne University since 2006. She holds a PhD on Maria Ondina Braga and works on contemporary Portuguese literature, with a particular interest in women's writing, gender issues, poetics and body politics. A member of CRIMIC at Sorbonne University, she has co-edited, among others, the volumes Femmes oubliées dans les arts et les lettres au Portugal - XIX-XXe siècles (Forgotten Women in the Arts and Letters in Portugal - 19th-20th Centuries) (2016), Poétiques et politiques du corps dans les aires lusophones (Poetics and Politics of the Body in Lusophone Areas) (2021) and Artistes et intellectuelles en France. Itinéraires multiples (Artists and Intellectuals in France: Multiple Pathways) (2023). Her monograph, À corps et à cri. Le féminin dans la littérature portugaise de l’extrême contemporain (With Body and Voice: The Feminine in Contemporary Portuguese Literature), was published in 2025.
• Maria Teresa Salgado is a professor of African literature at the Faculty of Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds a master's degree in Brazilian literature from UFRJ and a doctorate in African literature from PUC-Rio. She has conducted the following postdoctoral projects: in 1999, research on images of laughter in African literature at UFF; in 2015, a study of images of the quest for happiness in Portuguese-language literature at the Sorbonne; in 2020, research on the work of Leda Rios, an Afro-Brazilian writer silenced during the Belle Époque, at the University of Orléans. At the same time, since 2020, she has been working on the theme of psychological suffering in female authorship in Portuguese-language literature (Brazil–Africa). She coordinates the Écritures du corps féminin (Writings of the Female Body) research group at the UFRJ. She is currently preparing the work of Leda Rios for publication
• Sylvère Mbondobari is a professor of Francophone literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University. He studied intercultural German studies, Romance languages, comparative literature and political science at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). He holds a PhD in Literature and Philosophy with a focus on Romance and Comparative Literature and obtained his Habilitation (HDR) at Saarland University in Germany (Venia legendi in General and Comparative Literature). From 2004 to 2020, he held the positions of Assistant, Senior Assistant and Senior Lecturer in General and Comparative Literature and German Literature at Omar Bongo University in Libreville (Gabon). He was also a visiting professor (DAAD) at the Chair of Romance Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication at Saarland University in Germany (2010, 2015-2016, 2018), and a former fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG: 2002-2003) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2008-2010, 2013, 2017, 2021). A member of Apela, his research interests include colonial literature and culture, travel literature, Francophone African literature and culture, postcolonial literature and theory, cultural and diasporic studies, geocritical Francophone crime fiction, and cultural transfer.
• Jules Falquet is a university professor of philosophy and a member of the Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Philosophical Logics (LLCP) at Paris 8 Vincennes-St Denis University. She has lived in Mexico and El Salvador and works, from a feminist perspective and with a focus on the interweaving of social relations, on the resistance to globalisation of various Latin American and Caribbean social movements and on the Francophone and decolonial materialist feminist epistemologies of Abya Yala. Her most recent personal works include: La Combinatoire straight. Colonisation, violences sexuelles et Bâtard·es du capital, Paris : Amsterdam (2025), Imbrication, femmes, race et classe dans les mouvements sociaux, Paris : Le Croquant (2023), Pax neoliberalia. Perspectives féministes sur (la réorganisation de) la violence, Paris: Editions iXe (2016).
• Marina Pereira de Almeida Mello is a historian and professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), where she teaches in the postgraduate programme, History Teaching course. She holds a PhD in anthropology and a postdoctorate in postcolonialism and global citizenship from CES/University of Coimbra. Her research focuses on post-abolition social history, the black press, ethno-racial relations, gender and black feminism, with an emphasis on the experiences and voices of black women in Brazil. She develops work that combines history, anthropology, decoloniality and criticism of archive production systems. She is the author of books and scientific articles and participates in the training of teachers in anti-racist education in Brazil.
• Vivian Braga dos Santos is a temporary teaching and research assistant in the Arts Department at the University of Lille. After completing her PhD in art history and theory in 2018 at the University of São Paulo on the ‘historical function’ of artworks, establishing a new relationship between artists, their practice and the political conflicts of their time that goes beyond the limits of the artist-witness model, she was a resident at the INHA from 2019 to 2024. Among other things, she led the ‘Black Performativities’ project, which investigated the relationship between the representation of black subjects in contemporary visual cultures and the self-inscription of their bodies as working material in performance art. She is currently conducting research on the issues surrounding conflicts over racial issues and contemporary art, particularly in the Brazilian art scene, based on two main areas of focus: archives and performance.
• Caroline Leal is an Indigenous scholar and feminist with a PhD in Anthropology. She is a professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil), where she teaches in the Intercultural Amerindian Degree programme (Agreste Campus) and the Postgraduate Programme in Anthropology. She conducts research with indigenous peoples and quilombola communities on issues such as territorial rights, the right to intercultural education (both basic and higher) and gender relations. She is a researcher at the Centre for Ethnicity Studies and Research (NEPE/UFPE) and the Study Group on Amerindian and Traditional Peoples (GEPI/Unilab