Digital Humanities Tackling Discrimination and Racism: Brazilian Professor Matheus Gato Speaks to the HUMA Team

On Tuesday, 11th of February, Professor Matheus Gato presented two research and public intervention projects he initiated in São Paulo to the HUMA Team. These projects aim to disrupt Eurocentric curriculums and deploy the digital humanities to rethink anti-biased technologies for the welfare of black Brazilians -- to build a bridge between science and anti-racism initiatives. 

These projects are based at the University of Campinas and Afrocebrap -- a research division of the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). The first project concerns disseminating the work of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Brazil. Read more on that initiative.

Its first objective is to make the work of Du Bois, a founding sociologist in Black critical thought, accessible in Portuguese. The second is to evoke his sociological contributions, which assumes the centrality of the racial question to counter a nationalist narrative that has erected the myth of racial democracy in Brazil based on exclusively European canonical references. In the second part of his special talk at HUMA, Professor Gato introduced the Chama project, an important initiative that carries the dual meaning of ‘to call’ and ‘flame’ in Portuguese. Read more here:

 This project is poised to make a profound contribution to affirmative action, anti discrimination work and an impact on society. The digital platform maps cases of discrimination in the state of São Paulo. Working with digital programmers, it scans judicial archives using a search tool. The cases detected (racism, insults, threats) are placed on a map of the city of São Paulo, indicating where the offences occurred (public or private). Making this data publicly and interactively available is to make the daily presence of discrimination in Brazilian society accessible to researchers and activists. 

Beyond an anodyne notion of structural racism, Professor Gato and his team consider it essential to know where, when and how discrimination occurs so that effective public policies can be demanded and the general public can carry out economic boycotts of companies that use discriminatory practices in their business.