I'm a writer and researcher based in Lisbon, working at the intersection of childhood, education, migration and social policy. This was a path led through classroom and education experience, not the library alone.
I trained as an early childhood educator and specialised in psychopedagogue in São Paulo. I have also worked as a Human Rights Programme Officer for the city of São Paulo, and as a Refugee Protection Consultant for the ADUS Institute. I also coordinate a national teacher-training programme on children's rights for Fundação Abrinq and Acervo Otávio Roth.
I hold a bachelor's degree in International Relations, a teaching degree in Pedagogy, and a postgraduate degree in Psychopedagogy, all from institutions in São Paulo, followed by a master's in Sociology of Education from PUC-SP. I'm currently an FCT-funded PhD researcher in Migration Studies at the University of Lisbon, where my fieldwork takes place inside schools running UNICEF Portugal's School for Children's Rights Programme, examining how migrant and displaced children experience participation and belonging.
I write about what this work teaches me. I write about and with curiosity and the willingness to stay astonished.
Based in Lisbon, Portugal (CET) · PhD Researcher in Migration Studies, University of Lisbon (FCT-funded) · Languages: Portuguese (native), English (fluent), Spanish (fluent)
PhD Candidate on Social Participation of Refugee Children
Remote consultancy and writing commissions on childhood, migration and children's
Coordinator in Fundação Abrinq-funded teacher-training programme (Acervo Otávio Roth)
"Escrevo. E pronto. Escrevo porque preciso. Preciso porque estou tonto. Ninguém tem nada com isso. Escrevo porque amanhece." Paulo Leminski
loosely, by me: I write . And that's it. I write because I have to. I have to because I'm dizzy with it. Nobody has nothing to do with it. I write because morning comes.)
As long as I question, I'll remain writing.
My first lines were written in notebooks lined with plush fur and strawberry-scented stickers, inside a tent built from stuffed animals, in the middle of my bed. That thread never left me, it just tied itself to theirs: children, whose capacity to ask more original questions than doctoral researchers like me challenges us to see the world through prisms no single note could ever hold.
My master's leafed through the pages of children's literature; in my PhD, I draw maps by which adults might build children's meanings of the world into public policy. Along the way, my formative years were spent inside classrooms as an early childhood educator, and at São Paulo's Municipal Secretariat for Human Rights, keeping children's hundred languages alive in every corner of adult-built spaces.
Between International Relations, Pedagogy and Psychopedagogy, I write what moves between the world's eyes and a child's: in newspapers, academic books, or napkins in a restaurant.
I write because this is how I keep questions that don't seek answers, but attentive subjects able to return, from each one, ten more.