Rosanna Dent is defending her Dissertation

Studying Indigenous Brazil: The Xavante and the Human Sciences, 1958-2015, examines how Indigenous people and scientists from disparate human-centered fields, including genetics, anthropology, and public health, have engaged one another since the 1950s in Brazil. Through a case study of the Xavante of Mato Grosso, it traces the evolution of transnational intellectual approaches to characterizing human biological and cultural diversity. It shows how Indigenous people have engaged in scientific knowledge making for their own social, economic, and political ends, and have, in the process, shaped the scholars and disciplines that sought to characterize them.