“Bureaucratic Vulnerability: Possession, Sovereignty, and Relationality in Brazilian Research Regulation”

 

"Professor Dent’s work in the academy demonstrates the highest standards and embodies principles of social justice in research, teaching, and global community build. Dent’s research essay, “Bureaucratic Vulnerability,” explores colonialism in Brazil as an ongoing structure rather than an event of the past and does do by developing innovative historical methods in working with indigenous Xavante people. With deep care, nuance, and scholarly rigor, Dent grapples with balancing positions both within the Xavante community and within scholarly communities. In doing so, Dent’s work gives courage to other historians of the human sciences to further consider the place of ethnographic practices in historical knowledge making. Dent’s work is a profound yet humble call to attend to how historians might navigate institutional bureaucracies and personal moral codes, as well as what Dent calls “systems of relational ethics” within the communities."