Janaina Campos Lobo

Janaina Campos Lobo is a professor at the Institute of Humanities at the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB)—a public university in the Brazilian Northeast dedicated to fostering internationalization through partnerships with Portuguese-speaking countries, particularly in Africa, as well as other nations in the Global South.

She holds a PhD and an MSc in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS/Brazil). In 2022, she was a visiting researcher in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York, and she is currently a Lemann Visiting Scholar (2024–2025) at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University. She is also a researcher at the Center for Anthropology and Citizenship (NACi/UFRGS). From 2012 to 2017, she worked as an analyst and researcher in Agrarian Reform and Development at INCRA/Brazil, a federal institution, focusing specifically on programs supporting Black rural communities.

Her research centers on Afro-descendant communities in Latin America—particularly in Ecuador and Brazil—and draws on ethnographic fieldwork to explore themes of development and ancestral territoriality. Her current project investigates climate change from the perspective of Afro-descendant communities, highlighting their deep relationships with the environment through a climate ethnography that emphasizes territorial ties and connections that go beyond the human realm. She is currently writing a book based on this research.