Katucha Bento is a Black Brazilian woman, godmother/aunt of Chizara, Jaxon and Chibueze, children of the Black diaspora. Her main inspirations come from quilombola and samba communities, poetry, queer language and Black Decolonial feminisms that create possibilities to promote ethics of caring with accountability and power to the people with love as a revolutionary tool for change.
At the University of Edinburgh, Katucha Bento is a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies in the Sociology department and the first honorary chaplain in Candomblé. She served as co-director of RACE.ED Network until December 2023.
She is the co-founder of the Free Afro-Brazilian University of Sociology and Communication (UNAFRO); and the Associate Editor of the academic journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
The Black Brazilian movement was a seminal mark of her trajectory and training. She studied at the Núcleo de Consciência Negra at the University of Sao Paulo– NCN-USP, an NGO founded by the Black Movement in Brazil that offered free preparatory courses to enter university. There, she learned about forming assemblies for collective organising, participated in conferences for racial justice organised by activists, and was taught by amazing educators on many diverse topics that included civil rights, human rights and freedom fighters worldwide.
Her transition to university in 2003 exposed her to new concepts to understand society with a unique cohort of students starting their journeys and others already well established in the fight for social justice (workers’ union leaders, social policy designers and activists). Despite Brazil having over half of its population self-identified as Black, Katucha was one of the few Black students in her cohort to graduate in 2006, when she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Politics from the Foundation-School of Sociology and Politics of Sao Paulo (FESPSP). Her final dissertation was an anthropological study discussing the racialised aspects in sexual and affective encounters at samba parties in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.
She graduated in 2013 from the Master’s program in Sociological Research at the University of Barcelona, a program based on methodology and new approaches to Sociology, where she discussed racialisation, affection and love, whiteness and coloniality in relationships between women who love women or self-identified lesbians. In Spain, she also engaged in international research about migration in Europe and a study with transgender women about their experiences with the health care system and everyday interactions.
Katucha completed her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy 2020 at the University of Leeds. Her doctoral research discussed how Black Brazilian women negotiate meanings of Blackness while living their diasporic experiences in the United Kingdom. Her doctoral trajectory was marked by the solidarity of Black scholars who paved the way for her to experience academia in a more gentle, caring and respectful way. For that, she has eternal gratitude to Shirley Anne Tate, Gail Lewis, Iyiola Solanke, Jackie Kay, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Robbie Shilliam, and so many Black scholars who offered solace, support and reference to become a disruptor of colonial paradigms of scholarship, labour and collegiality. For the long or short exchanges, these people truly inspire her work to this day.
Her research projects are interested in exchanging knowledge and generating dialogue based on transnational anti-racist solidarity.