Luísa Helena Gonçalves de Melo

Luísa is a brazilian scholar and graphic artist who grew up in the outskirts of Brasilia and has lived in many latin american countries, including Mexico, where she got an MA in Urban Studies. Her experience of marginality informs her approach to academia as a potential space to create counter-narratives and emancipatory connections between her community and other marginalized groups.

Her research analyzes how collective cultural expressions serve as counter-hegemonic practices that subvert the urban planning of the city. She focuses on how marginalized people create a shared sense of belonging through their collective cultural practices to create new ways of dwelling in the contemporary city. Religious processions, community gardens, and murals are not isolated acts: together they are cultural practices that challenge ruling class power. Her work is based on the argument that by subverting the original purpose of the public spaces, marginalized people have been creating alternative ways to dwell in the city, recreating, resignifying and reimagining the place we live.