Arroz Africano no Mundo Atlântico

PROGRAMME
 
14h30 – 14h40
Screening of the motion portrait Bu simentera i di nundé? [Where Does Your Seed] by António Castelo and Lentim Nhabaly

14h40 – 14h55
Introduction by the moderator Erikson Mendonça

14h55 – 15h50
Judith Carney and José Filipe Fonseca

15h50 – 16h30
Discussion open to the public

16h30 – 17h00
Socialising moment 


José Filipe Fonseca (Guinea-Bissau) is an agronomist. He has dedicated himself to the study of biodiversity, society and human health, the history of enslaved Africans and their universal legacy, and the history, culture and art of ngumbé (traditional Guinean urban music). José Filipe Fonseca was director of the Planning Office of the Ministry of Rural Development; advisor to the Guinea-Bissau Embassy in Brussels and the Guinea-Bissau Mission to the European Union and the Secretariat of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP); Senior Programmes Coordinator and Head of Department at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (joint ACP-EU international organization), based in Wageningen, the Netherlands; co-founder of the Guinean NGO Action for Development; and co-founder and coordinator of the National One Health Network. He translated the book Black Rice. The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, by Judith Carney. In 2023, she created her personal blog, Bentem.

Judith Carney (USA) is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research focuses on African ecology and development, food security, gender and agrarian change, and African contributions to the environmental history of the New World. She is the author of nearly 100 academic articles and two books: Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001) and In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009), for which she was awarded the Melville Herskovits Book Award and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, respectively. Carney has received several distinctions, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and appointment as a Fellow of the Association of American Geographers in 2018. Her research has been supported by the National Geographic Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Collaboration with geneticists and plant scientists has resulted in two articles published in Nature. Her current research focuses on the human use of West African mangrove ecosystems in the context of climate change and conservation initiatives. This research is part of a book project on the environmental history of mangroves in the Black Atlantic.

Moderator:
Erikson Mendonça (Guinea-Bissau) has a degree in law and is a member of Tiniguena, Esta Terra é Nossa!, where he coordinates various projects—it is a Guinean NGO founded in 1991, which aims to promote participatory and lasting development, based on the conservation of natural and cultural resources and on the practice of citizenship, focusing on environmental issues, food and nutrition sovereignty and safety, community organisation and mobilisation, the influence of public policies, and female empowerment.