Research Project
Interfaces of Digital and Ancestral Health. Indigenous Cosmologies and Algorithmic Governance in Global Health
In global health, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and large health data infrastructures are increasingly used to identify and measure risk, shaping at the same time what comes to count as health knowledge and which forms of care institutions recognise. This project follows these developments into their encounter with Indigenous understandings of health, drawing on my ongoing ethnographic collaboration with Guarani Mbya communities in the Indigenous Land of Jaraguá in São Paulo, where health is closely connected to territory and to the collective life of the tekoa. I bring these experiences into dialogue with the work of Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa, whose thinking also connects the health of people to the health of the land, reaviling some of the limits of approaches that reduce health to individual and measurable conditions. The project draws on Antônio Bispo dos Santos’s notion of confluence to think about encounters between different knowledge systems without assuming that one has to absorb or replace the other. Moving between ethnographic work and theory, I develop the concept of epistemic coexistence to describe the conditions under which different understandings of health can enter institutional forms of governance while retaining their own terms. In this way, the project examines how digital and Indigenous forms of knowledge meet and how these encounters reshape the boundaries of knowledge, care, and authority in global health justice.
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Biografische Angaben
Giovana de Souza Possignolo is a Brazilian legal scholar, sociologist, and documentary filmmaker, working across urban sociology, law and technology, and Latin American studies. She holds a BA in Law and an MA in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP) and received her PhD in Sociology from Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2026, where she was a doctoral fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) from 2020 to 2024. She has held visiting positions at the University of Groningen (2019), the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt (2026), and the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo (2026), as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) in Guadalajara, Mexico (2026). -
Publikationen
Souza Possignolo, G. (2026). Contesting the Margins: Feminist Activisms and the Reimagination of São Paulo's Peripheries. In N. Vallen, A.-K. Volmer, O. Kaltmeier & K. Kramer (Eds.), Vernacular Worldmaking and the Pluriverse: Stories, Practices, and Identities Between Latin America and the Globe (pp. 153–164). kipu. https://www.kipu-verlag.de/wp-content/uploads/ebook-Rethinking-series-2026.pdf Souza Possignolo, G. (2025). Unravelling urban borderlands: Territorialising intersectionality amidst interwoven social inequalities. sozialer sinn: Zeitschrift für hermeneutische Sozialforschung, 1 (Special issue: Intersectionality in interpretative social research: A methodological approach). https://doi.org/10.1515/sosi-2025-0005 Souza Possignolo, G. (forthcoming). Contesting the coloniality of the periphery from peripheral women's perspectives in São Paulo (Doctoral dissertation). Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Souza Possignolo, G. (in preparation). Interfaces of Complexity: Confluences Between Ancestral and Algorithmic Descriptions in Urban Legal Worlds. In R. Broemel, M. Schmidt & A. Schwerdtfeger (Eds.), collective volume of the research project Wandel im und durch Recht. Souza Possignolo, G. & Wagner, T. (in preparation). Disobedient Sources of Law: Disobedience as Undisciplinary Approach to Legal Knowledge Production. In S. Brachotte, C. Frison & L. Alvarez (Eds.), Decolonial Legal Methods. Routledge (Law and Anthropology Series).