by Janel Anderson (LACIS Outreach Coordinator & PhD Candidate, UW-Madison)
Each year LACIS, in collaboration with the International Division at UW Madison, sponsors the Joaquim Nabuco Award. The award is given to a degree-seeking student in any field for summer travel and research on a subject related to Brazil. All applicants must submit an essay and from that pool, the two best research travel grant proposals are chosen by a panel of faculty and regional experts.
This year we are excited to announce that Tatiana Madea (Post-MS Research Intern at the Sound Forest Lab) and Ned Littlefield (Ph.D. Student, Political Science) have been selected as the 2020 Nabuco Award Winners.
Tatiana Maeda’s Nabuco project is called “What is the Amazon rainforest telling us?” Her research will focus on “recording and listening to the rainforest fauna, [in an effort] to measure how diverse tropical forests are, and thus to evaluate what is and isn’t working towards biodiversity conservation.” As a native of Brazil, Tatiana hopes that her research will provide “a great source of enthusiasm to be able to support my country’s environmental conservation initiatives producing scientific knowledge of the largest rainforest in the world.” She plans to use her Nabuco Award to launch a help launch a long-term project aimed at monitoring the biodiversity of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.
Ned Littlefield’s award-winning project is titled, “Changing ‘racial democracy’ in Bolsonaro’s Brazil”. As a Ph.D. student, Ned is working on research for and about the changing meaning of democracy in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Ned hopes that the research he does as part of his Nabuco award will contribute to his dissertation by helping him establish contacts needed for his fieldwork in Brazil and help build his understanding of race and national identity. In addition, he plans to use his findings to help craft other articles documenting and analyzing democracy and race in Brazil.