Vera Sales

Vera Sales is a PhD candidate within ANIMAPOLIS. Her project aims to conceptualise animals and infrastructures as political subjects within urban scholarship on urban inequalities. In her research, she seeks to understand how more-than-human encounters shape uneven urban spaces, challenging traditional views of urban inequalities as solely human-made.

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Before joining the UvA, she studied anthropology at the New University of Lisbon (NOVA) and urban studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB and ULB), where she developed an interest in the study of urban inequalities. Connecting her interest in race and gender studies, she has explored the effects of urban redevelopment on the lives of marginalised communities. In Lisbon, she explored how touristification impacted the life of single mothers, while in Brussels, she explored how gentrification and neighbourhood renewal processes impacted the dynamics of labour exploitation and health inequalities for recently arrived Turkish-Bulgarian migrant communities.

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These experiences deepened her interest in urban planning's material and symbolic power, connecting to her dissertation’s engagement with questions surrounding the exclusionary power of urban infrastructures. Adopting a postcolonial framework to understand the production of space, Vera’s research also explores how racialized perceptions of space influence the socio-spatial dynamics of access to urban rights.

 

These inquiries have influenced her research within ANIMAPOLIS. In Vera’s PhD research, tentatively titled “Humans, rats, and infrastructures: A more-than-human approach to health inequalities in Rio de Janeiro”, she is investigating how the distribution of health risks and resources shapes and is shaped by differential distribution of rights and responsibilities based on factors such as class, gender, race, and space. She is concentrating on marginalised communities in Rio de Janeiro suffering from high levels of the rat-borne disease leptospirosis. Through multispecies ethnography, she aims to uncover the political role of animals and infrastructures in shaping urban inequalities and to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between power, inequality, and health.