Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Dear all,
My name is Natasha Prévost. I finished me Ph.D. in Women's Studies at Utrecht University at the end of November 2006. I came back to Montreal after six years last October 2007. I've been involved with the SenseLab and the GRIPAL (Groupe de Rechercher sur l'Imaginaire Politique en Amérique Latine) since I'm back. I'm moving to Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada as I got a job at the Centre de Recherche et Développement en Éducation where I will be a qualitative researcher. I took the job not only because I'm moving on the Atlantic coast but also because this Research centre receives research calls from outside. Sometimes it's the Government, but also the community and in fact more and more the community. I was train in Anthropology both at under and graduate levels. I conducted fieldwork research in Mexico, Brazil, Italy and The Netherlands. I first work with transvestites in Mexico and Brazil. Deleuze and his concept of nomadism comes into play here. I applied gender nomadism and identity deterritorialization as a theoretical framework to analyse the life stories of my transvestites colleagues. I also filmed a documentary taking place in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza about transvestite's life and body transformation. I then turn to Brazilian children between seven and twelve years old from poor, middle and rich socio-economical classes. We worked in their primary schools or cultural and literacy centre for a year. We talked about what was important for them. For each theme the children drew, told me a story and I filmed. These data were collected and edited as a DVD of five minutes of images, sounds and drawings per children. It ended up being the way for the children participating of this project to be aware of the existence of the others. For this project I had at heart the relational process between the researcher and the research colleagues. I thus dig into the concepts of Affect, Empiricism, Intuition, Movement, Difference, Sympathy, Experiment and Difference in order to better describe this experience and how to deconstruct power relations inherent to ethnographic fieldwork research. Right now I hope to start the prototype of a project I would like to build in Brazil, while living in Moncton which is an ecological school. This project is at an embryonic stage now but I'll keep you posted when it actually happens. Guattari will be of great inspiration for this project. I'm looking forward to meet you all!!! Alessandra, sorry if I did not react to your e-mail but I was between job interviews and NYC. Let me know when you are in town!

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