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Abstract

Coastal territories are critical for confronting the challenges of climate change, yet they remain disproportionately subject to overdevelopment, ecological degradation, and social displacement. In Brazil, national infrastructure programs like the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) and the Merchant Marine Fund have intensified these dynamics by promoting industrial port expansion at the expense of coastal Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities. This article examines the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS) in Pernambuco as a paradigmatic case of how neodevelopmentalist planning perpetuates environmental racism and territorial dispossession. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research with Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, I explore how residents confront these extractive planning regimes not only through resistance but through embodied, everyday forms of ecological care. The article develops the concept of relational ecological stewardship to theorize how traditional communities enact alternative planning practices grounded in ancestral knowledge, intergenerational obligation, and more-than-human responsibility. Through restoring access to ancestral territories, practicing gendered and intergenerational ecological knowledge, and repairing damaged ecosystems, residents articulate a planning paradigm rooted not in profit or technocratic control but in reciprocity and relational ethics. These struggles are situated within broader histories of colonial land regimes and racialized enclosure, revealing how coastal planning continues to reinforce unequal power structures. By centering the perspectives of historically marginalized communities, this article contributes to decolonial and environmental justice scholarship, and challenges dominant planning frameworks that treat traditional lifeways as obstacles to development. Instead, it argues that these communities already embody the principles of sustainability and justice that coastal governance claims to seek. Recognizing and supporting relational ecological stewardship is not just an ethical imperative—it is a necessary strategy for building more just, livable, and ecologically resilient coastal futures.

Keywords

Coastal planning Brazil African diaspora fishing ecological stewardship

Introduction

Coastal territories are critical for climate adaptation and ecological resilience, yet they remain among the most overdeveloped and ecologically vulnerable zones worldwide (Bax et al., 2021; Rovai et al., 2022). In Brazil, state-led coastal and marine development initiatives such as the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) and the Merchant Marine Fund have prioritized industrial economic development over the rights and knowledge of Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities (Amato, 2012; Maia, 2021; Pereira, 2013). Projects like the Suape Port Industrial Complex—one of 36 state-funded mega-port industrial complexes—have displaced traditional fishing populations and degraded mangrove ecosystems in the name of export-led growth (DHESCA, 2018; Ministério da Infraestrutura, 2016). These patterns reflect a coastal planning paradigm rooted in colonial logics of enclosure, extraction, and profit (Biesel and Mendonça, 2025). This article explores how Afro-Brazilian coastal communities enact alternative models of ecological stewardship that challenge dominant coastal governance and offer grounded, relational approaches to coastal planning.

Centering the lived experiences of Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho (Cabo) and Ipojuca—two municipalities along Pernambuco's rapidly industrializing coast—I examine how residents affected by the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS) are articulating and enacting alternative approaches to land, water, and ecological governance. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in 2018 and 2020–2021, I argue that these communities embody a form of relational ecological stewardship: a coastal ethic rooted in reciprocity, kinship, traditional ecological knowledge, and intergenerational care. Communities confront extractive planning not only through organized protest but through embodied, everyday practices of care—teaching children to track tides, replanting mangroves, gathering shellfish at dawn to avoid security patrols, and preserving ancestral knowledge through oral histories and cultural media. These are not only acts of survival but of world-making. They constitute a socio-ecological praxis that challenges the exclusionary and technocratic frameworks dominating Brazilian coastal planning (Jablonski and Filet, 2008). In doing so, these lifeways offer grounded models of environmental governance based not on control, but on coexistence.

At its core, this article is concerned with what it would mean to decolonize coastal planning—not in rhetorical terms, but through concrete engagements with the epistemologies and practices of marginalized communities. The central research question animating this inquiry is not simply how Afro-Brazilian communities have been impacted by coastal development, but how they imagine, contest, and enact different futures amid systematic displacement and ecological loss. What knowledge, practices, and ethics of relation do these communities bring to bear on planning conflicts? How are these positioned vis-à-vis state imaginaries of development, and what can they teach us about rethinking planning from below?

Across Brazil, the expansion of megaprojects like CIPS has entailed large-scale land acquisitions, the militarization of public space, and the enclosure of historically shared ecosystems such as mangroves, estuaries, and coastal forests (Maia, 2021; Perry, 2013; Santos et al., 2019). These processes disproportionately affect Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and other traditional populations who rely on artisanal fishing, agriculture, shellfish collection—among many other subsistence practices—for survival (Acselrad et al., 2012; ICMBio, 2018). In Pernambuco, decades of extractive planning have not only transformed physical landscapes but subordinated traditional ecological knowledge to the political logic of neodevelopmentalism—where the state serves as a guarantor of profitability for large-scale infrastructure and resource extraction projects aligned with global commodity markets, while non-capitalist ways of knowing and living are rendered obstacles to accumulation and routinely disregarded (Acselrad et al., 2012; Saad-Filho, 2020). Despite constitutional protections for traditional peoples and territories, communities in Cabo and Ipojuca continue to face dispossession, environmental degradation, and threats from port authorities and private security firms. While such dynamics are well-documented in the Brazilian literature on socio-environmental conflicts (Almeida, 2011; Little, 2001; Zhouri and Laschefski, 2010), less attention has been paid to how affected communities articulate their own visions of environmental stewardship—what planning should look like, who should be involved, and which lifeways deserve priority. This article contributes to that conversation by centering Afro-Brazilian communities not as exclusively victims of planning, but as co-authors of territorial futures, whose practices already constitute forms of planning grounded in lived relationships with marine and coastal ecosystems.

Methodologically, this research draws on over 40 interviews, focus groups, archival research and extended participant observation in fishing and shellfish-collecting communities affected by the CIPS expansion in 2018, 2020, and 2021.¹ Rather than impose an abstract theoretical lens on the data, I take seriously the critiques raised by planning and anthropology scholars alike: that theory must emerge from the struggles and experiences of communities, and that decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Porter et al., 2017). Accordingly, the article foregrounds the voices, actions, and epistemologies of the people most affected by extractive coastal planning projects. As a white scholar trained in environmental anthropology from the United States, I am acutely aware of the racial privilege and power asymmetries that shape knowledge production and fieldwork. I approach this research in solidarity with movements for land, racial, and environmental justice in Brazil. My positionality informs a commitment to collaborative and accountable ethnography that centers the knowledge, voices, and experiences of those most directly impacted by extractive planning and environmental dispossession.

In what follows, I first situate coastal planning within broader histories of colonialism, capitalist enclosure, and developmentalism, emphasizing how these forces have systematically devalued relational, gendered, and more-than-human forms of care that sustain coastal and marine life. I then provide ethnographic context for Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo and Ipojuca, examining how they have navigated—and resisted—the environmental and social violence wrought by the Suape Port Industrial Complex. The empirical core of the article develops the concept of relational ecological stewardship through three interwoven domains: (1) restoring access to coastal territories; (2) respecting embodied knowledge and more-than-human kinship; and (3) shifting from extraction to stewardship. The discussion section draws these threads together to reflect on how these lifeways challenge extractive logics and advance alternative planning paradigms rooted in care, kinship, and collective obligation. The article concludes by considering the broader implications for coastal planning in Brazil and beyond: what planning could look like if it began not with zoning schemes or port expansion plans, but with the knowledge and experiences of traditional fishers and shellfish collectors.

Decolonizing coastal planning: Toward relational ecological stewardship

In Brazil, as in many parts of the world, coastal governance regimes remain deeply entangled with histories of conquest, racialized dispossession, and capitalist enclosure (Hilton and Moore, 2023; Maia, 2021; Morris et al., 2024). Coastal territories are routinely treated as logistical corridors and zones of economic optimization rather than as ancestral and ecological lifeworlds embedded with spiritual, cultural, and historical meaning (Barra, 2024; Muhl et al., 2023; Porter et al., 2017). Mainstream planning frameworks—such as Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the blue economy—claim to balance environmental, social, and economic aims (Bax et al., 2021; Kay and Alder, 2005; Midlen, 2024). In practice, however, they often facilitate the commodification of coastlines under neoliberal logics (Maia, 2021; Srivastava and Mehta, 2023). These models treat the sea as a frontier for investment—via port infrastructure, marine tourism, energy extraction, or industrial fishing—while erasing local ontologies, ecological relations, and gendered labor (ibid.). As scholars have noted, these logics accelerate “green grabbing” and “blue grabbing,” enclosing coastal commons in the name of sustainability while re-allocating them to corporate and state-led interests (Muhl et al., 2023; Srivastava and Mehta, 2023).

Brazilian planning continues to operate through colonial categories that render Afro-descendant land claims illegible and ignore the relational frameworks through which traditional communities organize territory (Acselrad et al., 2012; Micaelo et al., 2014; Perry, 2013; Zhouri and Laschefski, 2010). This is particularly evident in the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS), which exemplifies what Zhouri and Laschefski (2010) call Brazil's “productive rationality”—a development model that prioritizes infrastructure and commodity exports over ecological and cultural integrity. CIPS reproduces spatial and racial hierarchies of the colonial sugarcane economy (Dabat, 2007, 2011; Ferraz, 2008), displacing smallholders, fishers, and shellfish collectors while polluting estuarine systems and transforming access to the coast (DHESCA, 2018; Santos et al., 2019).

For traditional Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, however, the coast is not merely a space to be governed. It is a living landscape of ritual, kinship, and care—where mangroves, tides, and marine life are regarded as relations rather than resources. These communities assert territorial rights through subtle and overt refusals of extractive planning, including nocturnal fishing to avoid surveillance, replanting mangroves, teaching children to track tides, and cultivating medicinal plants in degraded areas. These practices are not only survival strategies—they are grounded forms of relational ecological stewardship that propose alternative futures amid systemic abandonment and degradation.

In developing this concept, the article draws on feminist and more-than-human scholarship on care to foreground how resistance is also rooted in practices of maintenance, relation, and obligation. In these communities, care is not an individual or apolitical act—it is a collective, ecological labor shaped by histories of dispossession and modes of survival. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) theorizes care as a “speculative ethic” that binds humans to more-than-human worlds through acts of tending, repair, and attention. Such care is material and affective, simultaneously embedded in bodily labor and situated within contested ecologies (ibid.). Coastal residents’ cultivation of mangroves, protection of fisheries, and oral transmission of knowledge constitute precisely this kind of ethical engagement. These acts express forms of multispecies reciprocity that are rendered invisible within dominant planning frameworks.

Importantly, ecological, and more-than-human care is deeply gendered (Bauhardt, 2018; Harcourt and Bauhardt, 2018; Ressiore et al., 2024). Shellfish collectors (marisqueiras)—predominantly women—perform the everyday, intergenerational labor of environmental stewardship, often in degraded or militarized landscapes. Their work embodies what Ressiore et al. (2024) calls a “more-than-human care” that is simultaneously reproductive and ecological. Such care practices not only maintain social life but restore damaged ecologies, acting as counterforces to the violence of industrial development. In doing so, they refuse the separation between environment and society, and between subsistence and governance. Similarly, Silberzahn (2024) argues that care must be understood as a political and ecological response to crises of social reproduction—an insight especially relevant in contexts where state abandonment is accompanied by intensified ecological destruction.

As feminist theorists have long noted, care labor often becomes most visible in moments of crisis—when infrastructures fail, ecosystems collapse, or institutions retreat (Coulter, 2016; Di Chiro, 2008). In coastal Pernambuco, such conditions are not exceptional but ongoing. Yet rather than frame care as reactive or compensatory, these communities enact care as a political practice: a means of reclaiming territory, asserting knowledge, and sustaining more-than-human worlds. In this light, relational ecological stewardship is not only a descriptive framework, but a critical intervention—one that reorients planning around the lifeways and labors of those historically excluded from it.

Ultimately, relational ecological stewardship presents an alternative view of the coast, not as a development corridor but as a living web of interconnected life. To decolonize coastal planning, then, is not merely to include traditional communities in preexisting decision-making structures, but to reconfigure the terms of participation, authority, and knowledge. Just planning must begin by recognizing these lifeways not as obstacles, but practices that hold the tools to navigate ecological crises in ways that are socially, spiritually, and ecologically sustaining.

The fishing communities of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, Pernambuco

Together, the coastal communities of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca have a population of 300,000 and are in the Zona Sul, or southern region of Pernambuco's coastal Zona da Mata. This region, among the first sites of Portuguese colonization in the Americas, has exported sugarcane for nearly five centuries (Andrade, 2001; Dabat, 2007). From the onset, colonial environmental governance transformed the landscape into an extraction zone for the global sugar economy, relying on the enslavement of Indigenous² and African peoples (Ferraz, 2008; Gonzalez, 2020). Sugar production underpinned the colonial economy and remained dominant even after the abolition of slavery in 1888, entrenching deep land inequalities between latifúndia (landed elites) and formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilian populations (Dabat, 2011; Rogers, 2010).

Residents of Cabo and Ipojuca today are largely descendants of enslaved peoples who labored in sugarcane plantations. Many self-identify as negro/a or pardo/a, with ancestry linked to Indigenous and Quilombo³ communities (IBGE, 2010). These categories are not fixed but are deeply contextual, shaped by a history of marginalization and a politics of recognition (Almeida, 2011; Farfán-Santos, 2015). In Pernambuco, these identifications often act as tools for political assertion—whether through land claims, environmental resistance, or cultural expressions. The state designates these communities povos tradicionais, or traditional communities—a broad term encompassing those with subsistence-based livelihoods who have spiritual, cultural, and economic ties to the land and sea (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, Brasil, n.d.). Within these communities are Quilombolas, legally recognized Afro-descendant groups like Ilha de Mercês; posseiro s, long-settled residents without formal land titles; and parceleiros, who rent small plots from absentee landowners—each with different relationships to property, the state, and coastal governance (Micaelo et al., 2014).

Gender and generational dynamics further stratify experiences. Men typically engage in deep-sea fishing using boats, while women are marisqueiras —shellfish collectors who wade through mangroves, often barefoot and for hours, to gather crustaceans. This labor is both physical and knowledge-intensive, rooted in intimate familiarity with tide cycles (maré), seasonal fluctuations, and sacred coastal spaces (Ramalho, 2005). Children, often from the age of ten, accompany parents on fishing and collecting trips, learning skills orally and through embodied practice. These traditions are not only livelihoods but also cultural heritage. However, generational transfer is increasingly disrupted: many youths no longer see artisanal fishing as viable, citing pollution, declining biodiversity, and lack of access to ancestral territories.

While these communities maintain profound ecological and spiritual ties to coastal ecosystems, they face escalating pressures (Pacheco, 2008; Paes e Silva, 2012). In the early 2000s, Brazil's Growth Acceleration Program (PAC, in Portuguese) directed billions toward maritime infrastructure, including the 13,500-hectare Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS, in Portuguese). Positioned between Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, CIPS was strategically sited on land historically used for sugar plantation agriculture that is now used for small-scale fishing, subsistence, and cultural practices. The complex expanded into estuarine zones and dense mangrove forests—ecosystems critical not only for biodiversity but for the livelihoods of marisqueiras and fishers who rely on them for crab, aratu, shrimp, and other species. Dredging operations disrupted breeding grounds introduced sedimentation into tidal zones, and caused salinity shifts that made many collection sites ecologically unviable. In some areas, port authorities deforested entire mangrove tracts to make way for roads, pipelines, and container terminals. The 2014 opening of the state-owned Petrobras Abreu e Lima oil and gas refinery within the complex intensified these pressures, releasing airborne pollutants that not only damaged local vegetation but also contributed to a sharp rise in respiratory illness, especially among elders and children in nearby communities.

CIPS's expansion displaced over 26,000 people and physically reconfigured access to beaches, estuaries, and fishing grounds—spaces that form the backbone of cultural identity, subsistence, and ancestral memory. Estuaries and rivers that once provided pathways to fishing zones were blocked by fences and other infrastructure or patrolled by private security forces. Ancestral places like Ilha de Tatuoca and Rio Tatuoca, long used for community fishing and shellfish collecting, became difficult or dangerous to reach. Fish populations declined sharply and crustaceans whose life cycles depend on undisturbed mangrove nurseries. As biodiversity diminished, so too did the oral traditions, seasonal rhythms, and place-based knowledge passed down through generations.

These environmental and cultural disruptions have provoked sweeping socio-ecological transformations in Cabo and Ipojuca. Afro-descendant traditional communities, long dependent on these ecologies for both subsistence and spiritual vitality, have experienced forced dispossession from ancestral territories through land seizures, lease revocations, and intimidation by security contractors. Marisqueiras described being unable to return to harvestings site where their mothers and grandmothers once taught her to gather and set traps shellfish. Another community leader described the emotional toll of port expansion as “the death of elderly people who literally died of grief… depression caused by displacement” (Paula,⁴ interview, 7/23/20). These were not just environmental crimes, but ontological ruptures—tears in the moral and spiritual order that link people to place, memory, and more-than-human kin.

The experiences of displacement are differentiated. While some residents received limited financial compensation, many objected to the valuations or refused to relocate, triggering coercive responses. CIPS contracted private security forces who, according to multiple community accounts, threatened, harassed, and in some cases physically abused residents. Homes and cultivated plots were razed—sometimes while families were present, other times during their absence. These forms of intimidation, coupled with the demolition of livelihoods, left many with little choice but to accept unfavorable terms. Residents who moved to neighboring municipalities often attempted to return to their traditional fishing areas, only to be barred by armed guards.

Quilombola communities, such as Ilha de Mercês, have mobilized legal recognition to demand territorial protection through INCRA, although the bureaucratic process is slow and often politicized (Menezes and Barbosa, 2021; Welch, 2011). Meanwhile, parceleiros occupy plots granted through provisional arrangements with land owners, often without formal titling. These leaseholds are legally precarious and contingent on state discretion; they can be revoked with little notice under claims of “public interest” to accommodate port expansion. Several families reported receiving eviction notices without due process or consultation, sometimes accompanied by bulldozers and civil police or CIPS's private security. Posseiro s, who have occupied land for generations without formal deeds, are routinely classified as illegal occupants or squatters. This classification not only discredits their claims in bureaucratic settings but has also justified forcible removal. In at least two cases documented during fieldwork, residents described being displaced by police escorted or by private security agents contracted by CIPS, with homes demolished with little to no justification.

Gendered impacts are also clear: many marisqueiras report higher vulnerability due to their visibility in mangrove zones now patrolled by private security. Some recount harassment while collecting; others have suffered injuries navigating now polluted or dredged estuaries. Because they fish on foot—wading through mangroves and estuarine tides rather than using boats—they are more easily spotted and removed by guards working for CIPS. Their bodies, immersed directly in contaminated waters, are also more physically exposed to toxic industrial pollutants than their male counterparts, who fish further offshore. These women often describe persistent skin infections and respiratory issues linked to industrial runoff. Moreover, women frequently carry the gendered burden of providing food for their families, and several marisqueiras described the pressure to continue collecting even under threat. Some shared that, to avoid harassment, they now participate in “clandestine” fishing at dawn or at night, feeling they have ‘no other options.’

This aggressive displacement and surveillance are emblematic of the enduring logics of colonial governance, which in Brazil have historically worked through the racialized erasure of traditional land claims and the imposition of extractive infrastructures that displace relational ways of living (Acselrad et al., 2012; Maia, 2021; Zhouri and Laschefski, 2010). As Almeida (2011) shows, the territorial recognition struggles of Quilombola and other ‘new ethnicities’ reflect a broader political effort to resist colonial logics by reasserting collective land rights, cultural continuity, and historical memory. Coastal planning continues to prioritize extractive development over communal stewardship, enclosing land and water once held as commons (Maia, 2021). The Suape Port Complex exemplifies this, where ecological knowledge, territorial belonging, and more-than-human relationality are subordinated to state-backed economic interests. Under this regime, fishers and marisqueiras are not viewed as environmental custodians but as obstacles to infrastructural progress. The exclusion of these communities from decision-making reproduces centuries of racialized land alienation. Yet, as the following sections show, residents are not merely victims of this process. Through resistance, reoccupation, collective documentation, and cultural reclamation, they are actively proposing alternative futures for Brazil's coasts—futures grounded in ancestral knowledge and the right to remain.

Restoring access to coastal territories to traditional communities

The restoration of coastal territories is not only a matter of legal title or spatial access—it is the precondition for sustaining relational forms of ecological care. Without stable land tenure, the very foundations of intergenerational stewardship are undermined, revealing how colonial patterns of dispossession continue to structure who is allowed to live with and govern coastal space. Decolonizing coastal planning in Brazil must begin with the restitution of coastal territories to the traditional communities who have long stewarded them. In Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, territorial access and land tenure are deeply shaped by historical processes of racialized exclusion (Biesel and Mendonça, 2025). Residents’ current claims to land and ocean space are not merely legal or bureaucratic—they are interwoven with ancestral memory, ecological practice, and long-standing relationships to place. This section draws on ethnographic interviews to show how Afro-Brazilian fishing communities are navigating precarious tenure arrangements, asserting belonging, and organizing for land regularization and recognition in the face of systematic dispossession.

Contemporary struggles for land cannot be separated from the enduring legacy of the sesmaria land tenure system, which granted large tracts of land to Portuguese settlers in exchange for the promise to “civilize” the landscape through agriculture, particularly sugarcane (Ferraz, 2008). Over centuries, this system helped consolidate elite landholding patterns and created structural exclusions for Afro-descendant populations, even after the abolition of slavery (Dabat, 2007; 2011). While some plantations were eventually abandoned or sold off under economic pressures, the remnants of the system persist (ibid.). Today, many of Pernambuco's rural poor—including fishing families—live on land to which they have no formal title, despite generations of continuous occupation and land use.

Within these communities, distinctions between different tenure statuses are often blurred in practice but carry important legal and political weight. Some residents identify as Quilombolas, members of formally recognized Afro-descendant communities whose cultural identity and territorial claims are protected under Brazil's 1988 Constitution. Others are known as posseiro s—longtime residents without formal titles, often considered squatters by the state. Still others are parceleiros, leasing small plots from large landowners or sugar mills. These distinctions not only affect residents’ access to legal protections but also shape their vulnerability to eviction and their capacity to resist it. Luca, a posseiro in his fifties, described the precarious and uncertain nature of his community's land tenure:

“It's not ours, because we don’t have the deed to the land. We've been squatters for 50 years; many have been here for more than 50 years…but the land itself is in the name of Usina Salgado. But Usina Salgado owes a lot of money. This has already been put up for auction three times and failed. Now we are collecting documents to enter usucapião [legal process]… so we can try to obtain documentation for the land.” [Luca, interview, 2/1/2021]

Luca's explanation reveals both the fragility and the complexity of informal tenure. Although his family has lived on the land for half a century, they remain legally invisible. The usucaption process—a legal mechanism that allows individuals to claim land based on long-term occupation—is one of the few tools available to communities like Luca's, but the process is slow, expensive, and highly politicized. Others, like Ana, describe leasing small parcels for subsistence work:

“Do you know what a parceleiro is? It's a piece of land we rent from the usina [sugarcane plant]. We cut and plant sugarcane and spread fertilizer. The land was divided into parcels… but it is not ours. I wish it were.” [Ana, interview, 3/15/2021]

Often, these arrangements reinforce dependency. Tomas, a fisherman from Gaibu, explained how an entire community relied on a single landowner's permission:

“Gaibu only had one owner. Gaibu's land belonged to Doctor João. The people who were fishermen asked him for permission, he gave them a little piece of land and they built the houses. I think it was 40 years ago. Then the subdivision came, he decided to subdivide Gaibu, and he gave this space to the fishermen. But the rest of the land, they started to sell, and then the corporation came to Gaibu.” [Tomas, interview, 3/22/2021]

Such narratives reflect the clientelist legacy of Brazil's racialized land regime. In Tomas's telling, the generosity of a powerful individual shaped the trajectory of an entire community's access to land. But that same arrangement made residents permanently dependent on landowners, unable to secure long-term tenure or participate in decisions about development. This reflects a broader pattern of clientelistic relationships, in which landless residents must appeal to landlords for access, rights, or protection. While these arrangements may offer temporary security, they leave communities extremely vulnerable in the face of industrial encroachment (Nelson and Finan, 2009).

The expansion of the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS) exacerbated these vulnerabilities. Many residents in Cabo and Ipojuca were displaced from informal settlements without receiving adequate compensation or legal recourse. In some cases, they were offered financial indemnification, but those who refused the offer—or contested its value—were met with intimidation or forced removal. Several residents described how CIPS hired private security companies to destroy homes and garden plots, sometimes while residents were away at work or running errands. Families returned to find their roofs torn off or belongings scattered. Several interviewees described how homes and gardens were destroyed by hired security while residents were away. Flavia, describing the displacement from Ilha de Tatuoca, said:

“A lot of people who left there died. Luiz Abino—he lived more than 100 years in the same place—was dragged out like a sack of potatoes. He died of heart failure after that.” [Flavia, interview, 3/21/21]

These events left deep psychological and emotional scars. One community leader described how the forced disconnection from land and sea led to depression and even death among many elders, who could no longer access their cultural or subsistence lifeways. Yet, communities are not passive in the face of these threats. Residents are mobilizing a wide range of strategies to defend their claims to land and territory. Some, like Luca, are organizing collective usucaption petitions, gathering documentation and oral histories to prove continuous occupation. However, these efforts are often uneven and met with bureaucratic resistance. INCRA's land regularization process, although constitutionally mandated, is underfunded, overburdened, and politically fraught. Several residents reported years of petitioning with no progress. Under the Bolsonaro administration, anti-Quilombo rhetoric and policy rollbacks further undermined these processes, especially for communities without formal Quilombola designation (Menezes and Barbosa, 2021). In the absence of state recognition, many residents continue to occupy and use land regardless of formal ownership. One couple, Pedro and Daniela, explained:

“The land belongs to the usina [sugar plant]. We plant there anyway. Inspectors came to try to take it back, but gave up. We’re still waiting—if they ask, we’ll leave. But we’ve been planting here a long time.” [Pedro and Daniela, interview, 3/2021]

These daily acts of quiet defiance reflect a broader ethic of persistence. Residents are not waiting for permission—they are building futures in place. Non-profit organizations like the Centro das Mulheres do Cabo and Fórum Suape help residents document land use, prepare legal complaints, and launch public campaigns. In addition to legal and institutional strategies, residents are also turning to grassroots media and cultural production as powerful tools of resistance. Women from the community are using programs like Rádio Mulher, a women-led community radio program, to raise awareness about environmental racism, land dispossession, and the social impacts of CIPS. These broadcasts educate listeners on the lived realities of marisqueiras and fishing families, amplifying voices often left out of official planning processes. Meanwhile, Fórum Suape collaborates with artists and activists to produce culturally resonant digital content—including videos, performances, and visual art—that communicates the human and ecological costs of industrial expansion (Biesel, 2025). These strategies reflect an important shift: from merely demanding inclusion to actively shaping public narratives about justice, land, and belonging.

Furthermore, despite ongoing threats, communities assert that land is not only property but kin, history, and future. In this context, returning access to coastal territories is not simply about redistribution—it is about repairing epistemic and ecological relations that industrial capitalism has sought to sever. These empirical realities challenge the myth that coastal planning inevitably requires the displacement of traditional communities. On the contrary, as the residents of Cabo and Ipojuca show, it is possible—and necessary—to build planning models that begin with traditional stewardship, rather than exclude it. Their daily practices, legal strategies, and community knowledge represent more than resistance; they represent alternative futures already in motion.

Respecting and prioritizing different ways of relating to nature

The daily practices of fishing and collecting in Cabo and Ipojuca illustrate a relational ethics of care that is fundamentally incompatible with extractive planning. Here, traditional knowledge is not just ecological data—it is a mode of being. In traditional fishing communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, ecological knowledge is rooted in relationships. Residents’ practices of fishing and collecting are not understood as discrete economic activities but as part of a broader set of lifeways embedded in familial, spiritual, and ecological rhythms. In contrast to dominant coastal planning paradigms, which frame the coast in terms of utility, extraction, or risk management, fishers and marisqueiras describe their engagement with the ocean and mangroves as shaped by kinship, memory, and daily interaction with and attunement to the maré (tide). For these communities, the coast is not simply a productive space—it is a place of belonging and intergenerational knowledge transmission.

The knowledge systems that emerge from this context are formed over a lifetime of daily interaction with coastal ecosystems. One marisqueira recalled her childhood living among the mangroves, learning from her mother to identify shrimp and shellfish and catching kilos of them by hand. “We caught shrimp in buckets—two, three kilos,” said Lidia. “Back then there was a little lagoon where we caught shrimp, fish, and bathed. We lived there.” [Lidia, interview, 3/22/21] These memories speak not only to the material abundance of earlier times, but to the forms of ecological expertise that developed through embodied practice. Among many fishers and marisqueiras, learning begins at a young age—often between ten and fourteen—and continues through intimate daily work with land and water. As Flavia explained, “We lived our entire lives in the water. I have five brothers. Our father did it like this: one would go look for shrimp, another for soft crab. My dad used to get sticks from the forest and make the rafts.” [Flavia, interview, 3/21/21]

This intergenerational knowledge encompasses a detailed understanding of tidal cycles, fish behavior, net and trap making, and raft construction, as well as seasonal changes and the sensory cues that indicate where and when to collect. Such knowledge is not only situated but deeply gendered. In these communities, men tend to fish in deeper waters using boats, while women work in mangrove and estuarine zones, wading through water for hours to collect shellfish. These gendered divisions of labor are not merely practical but reflect broader histories of exclusion and autonomy. Women are less likely to have access to boats or formal employment, and many have relied on collecting as a form of independent subsistence, particularly during periods of hardship or marital separation.

As one woman put it: “I thank my mother. Every time something bad happened in my life, I would do it [fish and collect]. When I got married, then I got separated, I went to sell roasted fish at the market.” [Gabriella, interview, 3/10/21]. Fishing and collecting shellfish have long provided women with economic autonomy that does not require male permission or institutional support. However, women also face specific forms of vulnerability. Because they work in shallow waters and mangroves, they are more directly exposed to chemical pollutants from nearby industrial operations. Ana, a longtime marisqueira, described the decline of biodiversity and the physical effects of pollution on local ecosystems:

“This mangrove was rich—lots of fish, lots of aratu, lots of crab, lots of shellfish. Then they built that damned pit and dumped that green water…the water stays green….now when we go to catch shellfish, they’ve already died.” [Ana, interview, 3/10/21]

This degradation is not experienced in isolation. It reverberates through social life, altering work patterns, increasing the distance marisqueiras must travel, and reducing the abundance that once sustained whole households. “Before,” Ana explained, “we caught six or seven dozen aratu a day. Now, to get that much, you have to go to Ilha da Cana, Barreiros, or Diamar.” [ibid.] The changes are experienced not only as environmental loss but as cultural rupture. Elders frequently remarked that younger generations were no longer interested in learning fishing or collecting practices, citing both ecological decline and fear of confrontation with port authorities or security guards. Others described trying to teach daughters or grandchildren in secret or at night, to avoid being harassed or seen. In rare cases, women fishers challenged norms by venturing into deep sea. Antonia, one of the only women in her village to do so, described persistent gendered prejudice:

“I still suffer from this. I fish on my father's boat, and when I argue with him, I ask for another boat but no one wants to take me because I’m a woman. They say, ‘Women are menstruating, they bring bad luck.’ But I’ve never stopped catching fish.” [Antonia, interview, 3/22/21]

Despite the constraints, women in the community continue to develop informal and collective strategies to maintain ecological relationships. At the Centro das Mulheres do Cabo, and Forúm Suape, women organize storytelling circles and informal education programs to preserve traditional knowledge. These efforts often go unrecognized by state institutions, but they represent meaningful forms of ecological stewardship and pedagogical continuity.

For many interviewees, the disappearance of key species—such as pitú shrimp or songbirds—is deeply personal. Augusto, an older fisherman, explained: “In all the cajá trees around here, you used to see canaries, those local canaries, they used to sing a lot, but nowadays you don't see any anymore; you don't see black-headed birds, caboclinho birds, those little birds that are native to our region, you don't see them anymore.” [Augusto, interview, 11/25/20]. These losses are both biological and cultural, marking the breakdown of longstanding relational ties between humans and more-than-human worlds. Several residents described this absence as a form of sadness in the body, a disorientation that cannot be named but is deeply felt. These are manifestations of what scholars have termed ecological grief—a mourning not only of species but of the relationships, rituals, and rhythms that sustained human and non-human life. Yet this grief is not merely passive. In Cabo and Ipojuca, it frequently catalyzes resistance.

Rather than accept the erasure of their lifeways, communities continue to fight for the right to know, live, and work in coastal spaces on their own terms (Biesel, 2025). What emerges is not simply a demand for recognition, but a rearticulation of planning itself—as a practice that must be relational, reciprocal, and grounded in lived ecological experience. To respect and prioritize different ways of relating to nature, then, is not simply to invite community members to public meetings or include them as stakeholders in environmental assessments. It is to treat their knowledge as central to the practice of planning. This would mean designing policies that align with seasonal rhythms, protecting access to viable harvesting grounds, and affirming the epistemic authority of traditional ecological knowledge. Fishers and marisqueiras are not seeking inclusion into existing systems. They are demonstrating—through daily labor, continuance, and care—that another way of being with the coast is possible.

From resource extraction to more-than-human stewardship

As extractive industries transform coastal ecosystems, residents respond with both protest and embodied forms of repair. These small-scale acts—replanting mangroves, tending hatcheries, mentoring youth—enact a more-than-human stewardship that rejects the disposability of land, life, labor, and offers a grounded countermodel to mainstream coastal governance. Traditional fishing communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca understand coastal stewardship not as a means to economic growth, but as an intergenerational responsibility. For these communities, the coast is not simply a set of resources—it is a web of relationships sustained through labor, reciprocity, and respect for more-than-human life. Deforestation, industrial runoff, and land privatization not only destroy these ecosystems, but also rupture the relational practices that have kept their ancestors and communities alive. This section draws from interviews with fishers and marisqueiras to show how residents have maintained—and in some cases, been forced to alter—their long-standing stewardship of the land and sea.

For generations, Cabo and Ipojuca's coastal commons provided food, income, medicine, and a sense of autonomy (Ramalho, 2005). Fishers and collectors learned how to cultivate and collect plants and herbs, as well as fish and collect shellfish, without depleting local resources. They calibrated their work with the tides, seasons, and breeding rhythms of culturally important species. These forms of stewardship were not extractive, but responsive—organized around cycles of abundance and restraint. But these relationships have been steadily undermined by coastal privatization, industrial runoff, and the port's industrial expansion. Júlia, a marisqueira in her forties, described the rapid spatial reconfiguration of access to the mangroves:

“When I came to live here, I would go in here, go out there, go up there—now nobody leaves anymore… they fenced the mangrove off… If they see you picking guaiamum (fruit) near the fence, they’ll stop you.” [Júlia, interview, 3/22/21]

Such enclosures transform not only access to traditional spaces, but also the cultural logics of fishing communities. Fences redraw boundaries in ecosystems that were previously understood as shared or rotating use zones. The mangroves, long seen as open commons, are now policed edges, where even approaching the water can provoke confrontation. These disruptions restrict the capacity to act as stewards and sustain relational ecologies. Marta, a woman in her 60 s, once supported her family by growing mangoes on the land adjacent to her fishing area. She explained how Suape Port's expansion disrupted this routine and dismantled the possibility of autonomy:

“Now that everyone has been indemnified, we no longer have fruit to sell like we used to… Before Suape took the people away to die of hunger, we had a life. I had mango crops… Now there aren't that many mango trees. All the mango trees have died.” [Marta, interview, 3/10/21]

In her account, “fruit” is not just a product—it is symbolic of a self-sufficient way of life that has been foreclosed. The decline in ecological function and access to coastal territories creates cascading challenges—families must purchase food they once grew, seek wage labor they once avoided, or migrate to fishing and collecting zones without support networks. Still, Marta noted that some neighbors were attempting to replant fruit trees and native herbs in small back-lot gardens, drawing on older cultivation practices taught by their parents or grandparents. Others clear trash from degraded beaches and mangroves, and avoid over-harvesting depleted fishing and collecting areas, using long-held knowledge to protect what remains. These are fragile but intentional efforts to maintain more-than-human relationality. One such example comes from Aurora, an elder who wakes each day before dawn not only to perform routine chores, but to steward and care for the land in quiet, habitual acts that affirm belonging:

“At four in the morning I get up, then I go to the bathroom, wash my face and lie down on the sofa, turn on the television very quietly, have a coffee… then when I see that the day has dawned, I get up and go water the plants, in the middle of the terreiro (garden plot) alone, watering the plants, throwing water there until six o'clock when Valentina gets up. I don't know how to stay still, I have to get up to water the plants, to walk around the terreiro, to say good morning to people when they pass by.”—Aurora, interview, 7/23/20

Watering plants in the terreiro may appear mundane, but it is a deliberate act of care that sustains memory, place, and identity amid displacement. Such everyday practices anchor residents in their territories and assert continuity in the face of erasure.

Beyond physical access and self-sufficiency, residents described how ecological degradation is eroding the viability of their knowledge. João, a fisherman in his 50 s, explained how dredging and contamination from Suape Port had destroyed local hatchery grounds:

“Here comes the Suape Port. Environmentally, almost 80% of the mangroves were degraded. That's where all the hatcheries are. We can’t fish in that area because the ships are there. The dredge dumps waste on top of the fishing grounds. It covers all the rocks where the fish and lobsters are. It's all gone. We thought a big port would be good, but nothing good came from it.” [João, interview, 3/13/21]

João's words directly challenge development narratives that cast industrial coastal development as progress. Instead, he articulates a worldview in which ecological destruction is a loss not only of biodiversity, but of cultural continuity. The transformations are particularly acute for women. Shellfish collection—done barefoot in mangroves—has long provided women a degree of economic and social autonomy, as well as intergenerational connection. But mangrove contamination and enclosure now restrict safe access. Despite this, some women continue to wake before dawn to collect shellfish or teach their daughters how to identify safe harvesting spots, passing down ecological knowledge as a form of resilience.

One of the most demoralizing shifts for residents has been the forced return to low-wage labor in the sugarcane industry, the very economy many sought to escape through fishing. While the port was initially promoted as an economic boon, few community members have secured long-term employment there. Instead, most jobs offered to Afro-Brazilian fishers and collectors are short-term and confined to cleaning, maintenance, or other low-paid service roles. Residents described how port authorities routinely hired outsiders for better-paying technical jobs, leaving local communities to cycle back into seasonal cane-cutting—labor that is physically grueling, pays meager wages, and reinscribes the colonial plantation inequities that have long structured the region. In this context, fishing and collecting had once represented a buffer against exploitative wage labor—one that is rapidly dissolving.

The erosion of fishing conditions has had a clear intergenerational impact. Many elders report that their children or grandchildren no longer wish to learn the trade. Some fear confrontation with security guards; others doubt that fishing can offer stable livelihoods. For João, this is one of the most painful consequences of port expansion:

“In the past, fishermen raised their children to follow their work, to continue it, but today no one wants to do that anymore… we pay for a good education so that they can leave, so that they don't go into fishing. This is a shame, because if there are no fishermen, there is no good food.” [João, interview, 3/13/21]

This intergenerational rupture threatens not only livelihoods, but also the cultural reproduction of ecological stewardship. In artisanal fishing families, knowledge is typically transmitted through shared practice—children accompanying parents on fishing trips, learning to read weather patterns, or traversing the tides together. Without youth willing to learn, or ecosystems stable enough to support the practice, this form of relational pedagogy becomes unviable.

Nevertheless, even amid challenges, residents continue to adapt and protect their coastal territories. Some nurture plants, others experiment with community hatcheries, replant mangrove saplings, or reintroduce traditional fruits and herbs with guidance from elders. These acts may seem modest in scale, but they reflect a broader ethic of care and refusal. They are not relics of a past way of life, but practices of relational ecological stewardship—grounded in interdependence, place-based knowledge, and more-than-human responsibility. What fishers and marisqueiras emphasize repeatedly is that they are not asking for charity or compensation—they are asking to be allowed to continue caring for the coast. They see themselves not as passive victims of development, but as its most viable alternative. For them, sustainability is not a technical fix but a spiritual and political imperative: to protect breeding zones, to live in balance, and to pass down knowledge. This is what decolonizing coastal planning must mean in practice: centering the authority, ethics, and lived expertise of traditional communities. It means acknowledging not just biodiversity loss, but the ruptured relationships that industrial planning imposes—and committing to repair.

Discussion: Relational ecological stewardship and the ethics of care

This article has argued that Afro-Brazilian coastal communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca are not only resisting extractive development but articulating alternative modes of planning rooted in relational ecological stewardship. Drawing on ethnographic evidence, the discussion here brings together three interwoven dimensions of this stewardship—territorial belonging, epistemic justice, and relational ethics—and situates them within broader debates on care, governance, and decolonization (Gesing, 2021; Muhl et al., 2023).

Territorial belonging in these communities is not simply a matter of legal land claims but an ontological relation to place. Expressions such as being “born of the mangroves” or “children of the tide” signal more-than-metaphorical ties that bind bodies, memory, and ecosystems in reciprocal obligation. Bispo (2015) emphasizes that Afro-descendant communities reassert land claims not through legal deeds alone, but through naming, dwelling, and cultivating space. These are acts of remembrance and reworlding that challenge the invisibility of Afro-Brazilian spatial knowledge in state planning regimes. Such practices directly confront planning frameworks that treat coastal territories as vacant, fungible, or merely logistical space. They also challenge the legal and epistemic apparatuses that systematically deny Afro-descendant territorial recognition under Brazil's development paradigm (Acselrad et al., 2012; Micaelo et al., 2014).

Epistemic justice forms the second pillar of relational ecological stewardship. Coastal residents, particularly marisqueiras and artisanal fishers, possess highly localized, intergenerational knowledge of marine species, tidal cycles, and ecosystem health. This expertise is developed not in laboratories but through embodied, care-driven engagement with the environment. Yet it is routinely excluded from environmental assessments and coastal governance, reinforcing hierarchies that privilege technocratic knowledge and render local expertise illegible (Datta and Kairy, 2024; Niner et al., 2024). This exclusion constitutes a form of epistemic violence, one that re-inscribes colonial hierarchies under the guise of rational planning.

Crucially, this ecological knowledge is deeply gendered. Marisqueiras, in particular, perform vital reproductive labor that sustains both ecosystems and communities. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argues, care is not only an ethical disposition but an ecological and material practice. It emerges through interdependence and vulnerability, and it is often feminized, undervalued, and made invisible within dominant development logics. In the coastal communities of Pernambuco, care is enacted through everyday acts such as identifying ecological degradation, transmitting oral knowledge, and tending to both human and more-than-human life. These practices resonate with what Ressiore et al. (2024) calls “more-than-human care"—a recognition of interspecies dependencies as sites of both political action and ecological repair.

Relational ethics, finally, speak to a broader ontological orientation: a way of living with, rather than managing, the coast (Gesing, 2021). In this framework, stewardship is not an extractive or managerial role but a practice of responsibility that extends across generations, species, and spiritual realms. Biodiversity loss is experienced not only as ecological damage but as a rupture in moral and affective relations. This understanding redefines what environmental governance might look like: not control over resources, but the cultivation of “right relations” (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2021; Lobo and Parsons, 2023). This ethic confronts the “slow violence” of coastal development—the gradual, accumulative destruction of ecological and social worlds that impairs the conditions for future life (Nixon, 2013; Radomska and Åsberg, 2022).

Together, these dimensions offer a grounded, place-based model of coastal governance—one that emerges not from abstract planning tools but from the ongoing practices of communities who live with the tide. Rather than being folded into participatory frameworks as stakeholders, these communities are already acting as planners, enacting lifeways that hold critical insights for planetary survival. In this sense, the concept of relational ecological stewardship is a call to reorient coastal planning toward reciprocity, care, and cohabitation across human and more-than-human worlds.

Conclusion: Reimagining coastal planning from the tide up

This article has argued that decolonizing coastal planning in Brazil requires more than rhetorical commitments to inclusion or technocratic visions of sustainable development. It demands a fundamental reorientation of planning paradigms—away from extractive, state-centric logics and toward what I have termed relational ecological stewardship. Drawing from ethnographic and archival fieldwork with Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, I have shown how everyday practices of care—whether teaching children to track tides, replanting mangroves, or preserving ancestral knowledge—constitute not just acts of survival, but grounded modalities of planning and world-making.

These practices emerge in direct response to a development regime that treats the coast as a logistical frontier (Saad-Filho, 2020). Across centuries of territorial transformation—from colonial sugarcane plantations to the contemporary Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS)—Afro-descendant communities have been subjected to overlapping forms of racialized enclosure, environmental degradation, and spatial displacement (Ferraz, 2008; Maia, 2021; Zhouri and Laschefski, 2010). The CIPS project, often framed by the state as a triumph of infrastructure and logistics, has displaced thousands, polluted estuarine ecosystems, and restructured coastal access without meaningful consultation or consent (DHESCA, 2018; Santos et al., 2019). These processes reproduce systemic patterns of environmental injustice that disproportionately impact communities whose legal status—as Quilombolas, posseiro s, or parceleiros—remains contested and precarious (Acselrad et al., 2012; Pacheco, 2008; Paes e Silva, 2012).

Yet, these communities are not merely victims of displacement—they are planners of alternative futures. Across three interlinked domains—territorial belonging, epistemic justice, and relational ethics—this article has demonstrated how residents of Cabo and Ipojuca enact a form of coastal stewardship grounded in relationality. Their struggles to restore access to coastal lands are not only legal claims, but expressions of ontological ties to place, kin, and ancestry (Bispo, 2015). Their ecological knowledge—especially that of marisqueiras, whose labor is attuned to seasonal cycles, biodiversity shifts, and signs of pollution—constitutes a sophisticated, gendered form of environmental expertise (Datta and Kairy, 2024; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). And their ongoing practices of repair—from community media documenting environmental injustice to the cultivation of medicinal plants—reflect an ethic of cohabitation that challenges the managerial logics of mainstream planning frameworks (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2021; Lobo and Parsons, 2023).

In foregrounding these lifeways, the concept of relational ecological stewardship seeks to reframe what counts as planning. Rather than viewing governance as a top-down process of control, this framework understands planning as a situated, embodied, and care-based practice. It challenges assumptions that sustainability and resilience are abstract policy goals and instead insists that these are already embedded in the lived ecologies of marginalized communities—often made invisible by planning regimes that prioritize market logics, spatial abstraction, and technoscientific authority (Midlen, 2024; Srivastava and Mehta, 2023). For coastal planning and allied fields, the implications are clear. Addressing the legacies of colonial dispossession and environmental racism requires structural transformations: land restitution for Quilombola and traditional communities; legal recognition of informal and customary tenure; protection of communal fishing territories; and institutional support for traditional ecological knowledge. But it also requires a deeper epistemological shift—one that recognizes that those most impacted by extractive development are not simply stakeholders to be managed, but stewards and planners in their own right (Alexander et al., 2019; Eisenhauer, 2023; Niner et al., 2024).

As global environmental crises intensify, planning will increasingly shape the futures of both human and more-than-human life. The evidence from Pernambuco demonstrates that alternative futures are already being enacted through the everyday practices, adaptive knowledge, and relational ethics of Afro-Brazilian coastal communities. Supporting these practices is not merely an act of inclusion—it is a necessary step toward transforming planning itself.

Highlights

The article explores how coastal planning in Pernambuco, Brazil, reproduces colonial patterns of land dispossession and environmental injustice through the logics of neodevelopmentalism.

Drawing from ethnographic research with Afro-Brazilian fishing communities, it theorizes “relational ecological stewardship” as an alternative planning paradigm rooted in more-than-human care, ancestral memory, and intergenerational responsibility.

The article illuminates how fishers and marisqueiras (shellfish collectors) resist extractive development by restoring mangroves, defending territorial rights, and sustaining traditional ecological knowledge under threat.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Award (DDRA), the University of Georgia Dean's Award. This study was approved by the University of Georgia's Institutional Review Board (reference number PROJECT0000035).

Fulbright Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Award, University of Georgia Arts and Sciences, (grant number n/a).

ORCID iD

Shelly Annette Biesel

Notes

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