Thauany Freire

Visiting Scholar

Thauany Freire is a geographer and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, conducting research funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Her research delves into how racial capitalism has transformed the Haitian population into a migrant workforce, which nowadays navigates experiences oscillating between hyper-mobility and immobility. Her Ph.D. research in São Paulo (FAPESP- 20/06119-3) focuses on how Haitian immigrants, residing in the outskirts of the city, address their housing needs amidst the continuous dynamics of the real estate market in the neighborhood. She also investigates how the daily practices and struggles of Haitian immigrants in the city create spaces that embody local agency, aimed at confronting the racial constraints and urban violences. She holds a master’s degree in Human Geography (2018) from the University of São Paulo, in which she explored the socio-spatial consequences of housing policies implemented in São Paulo’s inner city throughout the 2000s.

Participating Years

2024–2025

Anti-Capitalist Environmentalism

The existential problems of the planet are complex. Given capitalism’s obsessive growth primed by, for instance, land-grabbing, extractivism, social and economic hierarchies, and war, capitalist environmentalism leans heavily on tweaking armageddon to maintain its hold on futurity for the planet.

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?