Alana Zanardo Mazur

Migration, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Studies, Public Policy, Global Health, Women’s and Gender Studies, Critical Media Literacies, Raciolinguistics, Global Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies, Decolonial Research Methodologies, Art and Performance, Social Movements, Americas, Europe.

Alana Mazur (she/ela) is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology. Her current research interests lie across the intersections of cultural anthropology, environmental anthropology, migration, and science and technology studies. Mazur has investigated the connections between transnational and global political economies and settler colonial formations across the Americas through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens. In this line, her master thesis highlights how Indigenous women’s aesthetics of resistance to the nation-state and its mechanisms of dispossession interrelate on local and transnational dimensions. Through a multimodal approach, Mazur’s research has centered on Indigenous, Black, and feminist of color scholarship, decolonial theories, and queer of color critique. In doing so, she has examined how Indigenous women’s social movements, politics, scholarship, visual arts, performance, poetry, filmmaking, hip-hop, and social media platforms become spaces for collective political engagement in Brazil, the United States, and Canada. As such, her research stresses how these spaces become vehicles for refusal and contestation of settler biopolitical policies, state violence, Indigenous erasure, gendered and racialized discourses, and resource extraction across geopolitical borders. Building on these analytical frameworks, Mazur aims at contributing to scholarship invested in social change, participatory research, and decolonial praxis.

Present – Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

M.A. Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

B.A.: English and Translation Studies from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

• 3/2021 – Mazur, A. Z. “If we’re going out,” dear Vicenta, “we’re going out with some guts!”: Storytelling, Indigeneity, and Felt Experience in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. In Acta Iassyensia Comparationis. Special Issue, 17-33.  http://literaturacomparata.ro/aic/?page_id=1517&lang=en