Sabrina Fernandes has a PhD in Sociology and a Master's in Political Economy from Carleton University, Canada. She is currently a fellow with CALAS at the University of Guadalajara. Previously, a Full Collaborating Researcher at the University of Brasília, visiting researcher with the Latin American Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, senior research fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, and a fellow of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. She has geared her activist, research, and publishing work in the past years towards promoting political syntheses in the fragmented Brazilian Left with a focus on ecosocialism and its potential to foster resistance on the ground. She is the creator and producer of the digital communication project Tese Onze (“Thesis Eleven”), with over 400,000 subscribers across different online platforms and media output, including podcast and book club. The project bridges academic research and activist communication. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, served as head consulting editor for Jacobin Brasil, and often participates with interviews and articles in a variety of outlets of broad readership. Her first book, Sintomas Mórbidos, on leftist fragmentation in Brazil, came out in 2019 by Autonomia Literária and her second book, Se quiser mudar o mundo, an introduction to radical politics, is already in its seventh printing by Editora Planeta. She also prepared a new edition, with introduction and notes, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto in Brazil.

Selected recent publications

Books:
2020. Se quiser mudar o mundo: um guia político para quem se importa. Editora Planeta.

2019. Sintomas Mórbidos: a encruzilhada da esquerda brasileira. Autonomia Literária.

Others:
2022. “Right-Wing Authoritarianism Against Nature: The Latin American Context.” In: Global Authoritarianism: Perspectives and Contestations from the Global South, edited by IRGAC. Bielefeld: Transcript.

2022. “An eco-socialist strategy to win the future”. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

2022. (with M. Lowy, B. Akbulut, and G. Kallis) “For an Ecosocialist Degrowth.” Monthly Review 73, no. 11 (2022): 56-58. 

2021. “Ecological Imperialism and Jair Bolsonaro’s Agenda in Brazil.” New Politics 18, no. 3.

2020. “Ecosocialism from the Margins.” NACLA Report on the Americas 52, no. 2 (2022): 137-143.

2020. “Environmental Contradiction: The Need for an Eco-Socialist Paradigm on the Brazilian Left.” In: Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left, edited by Robert Latham, A.T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen, and Niko Block. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2020.

2019 (with J. Grigera, J. R. Webber, L. Abilio, R. Antunes, M. Badaró Mattos, R. Nunes, L. Paulani and S. Purdy) "The long Brazilian Crisis: a forum.” Historical Materialism 27, no. 2: 59-121.
 

Research Project as CALAS Fellow:

Title: The Latin American Ecocene

The Anthropocene is an era marked by a rupture with the natural environment and increased entropy that derived from actions within the human timeframe whose impacts will be felt for much longer in the planetary scale of time. This rupture is well embodied in the concept of the metabolic rift, which communicates the tendency towards irreparable fractures in the interdependent processes that make up nature and, consequently, human life. This era, as the crises stand today, will be short due to overall social collapse, but the task should be to create conditions to overcome and Anthropocene and reorganize and rebuild society towards an “ecocene”, where reconciliation between the human realm of necessity and the metabolism of nature is the norm. As a region, Latin America is uniquely positioned to explain the effects of the Anthropocene, as its peoples have long organized in resistance to it. The Latin American debates on alternatives to development and a decolonial approach to liberation serve a purpose that would aid other societies in the task of transitioning ecologically and economically so as to overcome the Anthropocene towards a new era no longer marked by the schism between humans and nature. The Anthropocene debate will benefit from a perspective that is rooted in the wealth of the Latin American debates on alternatives to the current state of society and that will also identify some of the social actors better positioned in their praxis towards change.