Meet Diva Moreira

Diva Moreira is a Brazilian political scientist and activist on social issues primarily concerning race, feminism, and the working class since the 1960s. She founded Casa Dandara, a cultural center promoting black self-esteem and leadership, for which she was awarded an Ashoka Fellowship. After the dictatorship, she dedicated herself to Black, feminist, and working-class movements and published newspaper articles, essays and books on the rights of public hospital patients, Afro-Brazilian culture, discrimination against black women, and the meaning of abolition. In addition, Diva Moreira coordinated the Secretaria Municipal para Assuntos da Comunidade Negra de Belo Horizonte (Municipal Office for Black Community Affairs of Belo Horizonte), creating public policies to protect Black urban territories. She also contributed to the United Nations Development Programme and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, coordinating research about race, poverty, and violence. Nowadays, Diva Moreira is writing a book on Afro-reparations and organizing a mass movement about the topic as a member of the Comitê Por Reparações em Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais’s Committee for Reparations).

She will be visiting campus on October 4th as part of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program’s Black in the Americas series.

Hosted by the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program with support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities; Center for Social Science Scholarship; Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts; Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies; Global Studies; Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Political Science; and Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health.