Allies & Obstacles

Pamela Block · Pesquisa no Brasil

Research in Brazil

For more than three decades Pam has worked with disabled people, families, activists, and scholars in Brazil — on the history of eugenics and institutions, autism and self-advocacy, disability arts, and the growth of Brazilian disability studies.

Overview

Pam is fluent in Portuguese and began working in Brazil as a doctoral student. Her Duke University dissertation, Biology, Culture and Cognitive Disability: Twentieth Century Professional Discourse in Brazil and the United States (1997), compared how professionals in both countries understood intellectual disability.

Since then her Brazilian work has moved from archival history to participatory and arts-based research led alongside disabled Brazilians, including Black, quilombola, and Indigenous communities.

Themes

  • Eugenics and institutions

    How twentieth-century Brazil built institutions, sterilization practices, and sexual control around intellectual disability, and the ideas it shared with the United States and Europe.

  • Autism and self-advocacy

    Professional treatment, family advocacy, and autistic pride in Brazil from the 1940s to today, compared with autism policy in the United States.

  • Disability arts and anti-eugenics

    Portraits, film, and co-created media in which disabled Brazilians represent themselves, as a practice against eugenic ways of seeing.

  • Brazilian disability studies

    The emergence of disability studies in Brazil and the Global South, and ableism (capacitismo) in education and public policy.

Projects

  1. 2022–2025

    Defiça Portraits: Disability, Art and Communication

    Principal Investigator, with Nádia Meinerz

    Disabled Brazilians create portraits and stories of their own lives. Funded by a SSHRC Connections Grant, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

    Retratos Defiças website

  2. 2024

    Filús

    Co-creator

    A documentary made with members of a quilombo community through social mobilization and participatory filmmaking. Screened at Kyoto University and presented as anti-eugenics practice at the University of São Paulo (2025).

  3. 2026–2027

    Barriers to Supports and Services for Disabled Brazilians in Urban Quilombos and Urban Indigenous Communities

    Principal Investigator

    A new study of the barriers disabled Brazilians face in reaching supports and services in urban quilombola and Indigenous communities.

  4. 2020–2023

    Brazil–Canada Disability Research Speaker Series

    Principal Investigator

    Mentor-matched talks pairing Brazilian and Canadian disability researchers, alongside the “Realidades de Deficiência no Brasil” webinar series and a collective-access curriculum project in anthropology.

Selected publications

  • Ableism in the academic trajectories of Black disabled women: an intersectional analysiswith M. Gesser, V. Aydos, and A. Escada · Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2025
  • Ableism in educational trajectories and the production of access fatiguewith M. Gesser, V. Aydos, and P. Xavier da Silva · Educação & Realidade, 2024
  • Defiça: Antropologia, Arte e Ativismospecial issue, co-edited with N. Meinerz · Revista Mundaú 13, 2023
  • Disability and Covidspecial issue, co-edited with Pereira, Mello, and Sakellariou · Disability Studies Quarterly 41(3), 2021
  • Participation, Agency and Disability in Brazilwith M. Gesser and A. H. Nuernberg · Journal of Disability Studies in the Global South, 2019
  • “With the knife and the cheese in hand!”: a virtual ethnography of the cyber-activist disabled movement in Brazilwith M. A. Gaverio and A. G. Mello · Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism, 2019
  • Autism Policy and Advocacy in Brazil and the United Stateswith R. C. Lima, C. Evans, and C. Feldman · Autism in Translation, Palgrave, 2018
  • People with Disabilities: Fighting for their Rights in the USA and Brazilwith B. Angelucci and L. Costa · Revista de Educação PUC-Campinas, 2017
  • Occupying Disability Studies in Brazilwith A. G. Mello and A. H. Nuernberg · Occupying Disability, Springer, 2016
  • Historical Perceptions of Autism in Brazil: Professional Treatment, Family Advocacy, and Autistic Pride, 1943–2010with F. Cavalcante · Disability Histories, University of Illinois Press, 2014
  • Brazil and Disability Studies: On the Mapwith D. J. Conner, S. Calder, M. Rembis, and N. Watson · Disability Studies Quarterly 34(1), 2014
  • Institutional Utopias, Eugenics, and Intellectual Disability in BrazilHistory and Anthropology 18(2), 2007
  • Sexuality, Parenthood, and Cognitive Disability in BrazilSexuality and Disability 20(1), 2002