J. Lins Góes de Carvalho (Juliana) MSc

I am a PhD Candidate in the Environmental Governance and Politics chair group. Trained as a biologist, I have always worked across disciplines, moving between the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

My academic path began with a focus on ethnobotany during my undergraduate studies, where I was politically engaged with peasant social movements in Brazil. I went on to complete a Master’s in Botany at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), where later I also held a research fellowship. During this time, I traveled extensively along the major rivers of the Brazilian Amazon, always working with riverine communities. My work explored how both past and present Indigenous management shape and enrich biodiversity and landscape patterns. Collaborating with anthropologists and archaeologists, I was part of one of the main research groups that helped challenge the myth of the Amazon as untouched wilderness, highlighting instead the role of long-term Indigenous management in shaping the forest as a cultural landscape.

After this period in academia, I worked for three years at the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), one of Brazil’s leading civil society organizations focused on Indigenous rights. There, I engaged in intercultural research with Indigenous researchers monitoring biodiversity and climate change, with a research design mirrored Indigenous ontologies.

In my PhD, I investigate networks of solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations in Brazil and Europe. I explore how they come together around shared, but also divergent concerns for the Amazon in the context of global climate change. Drawing on a decolonial perspective and feminist science and technology studies, I examine how these alliances are shaped by both common goals and different ontologies.

My work has been published in leading academic journals, I have co-authored three books, and I have contributed to intercultural and science communication platforms.