Navigating Through Colonialism in Ocean Literacy
- Date: Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025
- Time: 12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
- Location: PCN 2012 6445 University Blvd
- Speaker: Dr. Melissa Vivacqua
Bio
Melissa Vivacqua is an Assistant Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. affiliated with the Institute of Marine Sciences and the Indigenous Intercultural Teaching Degree Program. She also serves as a researcher at the Kaapora Chair of Traditional and Non-Hegemonic Knowledge.
Holding a PhD in Political Sociology, she brings extensive experience in transdisciplinary research within the Brazilian coastal zone, collaborating for over 20 years with diverse traditional communities and scholars from multiple fields. Since early 2025, she has been a visiting scholar at EDST, where she conducts research on Decoloniality in Ocean Literacy.
Description
A sensitive and persistent challenge in the global ocean agenda has been fostering dialogue with Indigenous and traditional peoples and their knowledge systems. At the outset of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), UNESCO recognized both the absence of these voices and the need to include them in the development of Ocean Literacy. Since then, efforts have been made, yet Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and activists continue to highlight how institutional strategies for integrating Indigenous knowledge can reproduce hierarchical power relations and colonial violence.
This talk addresses these complexities by mobilizing the image of the slave ship as a metaphor, exploring its colonial-modern architecture to trace the roots of the current ecological and social crisis. It further explores the paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges involved in fostering generative dialogue with Indigenous and traditional peoples within the field of Ocean Literacy.