Antropologia com deficiência: itinerários e experiências em Boa Vista/RR

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the journey of adolescents with disabilities and the trajectories of their mothers through an ethnographic, critical, and intersectional lens, focusing on the city of Boa Vista, Roraima. The research follows the experiences of caregiving mothers—especially Dona Cleide, Suely, Raimunda, and Karina—and their daughters, revealing both the access to and challenges in obtaining health and education services. Throughout the work, an anthropology of disability is developed, built from listening, presence, and the researcher’s own path—she herself being a woman with a disability. This embodied perspective allows for an analysis of caregiving practices and the impact of bureaucracy on bodies perceived as deviating from the “norm.” In this study, I propose an anthropology rooted in everyday life, in dialogue with authors who explore disability, ableism, dissident bodies, motherhood and care, intersectionality, and public policy—grounding the theoretical and ethical construction of this research. Disability is not viewed as absence or limitation, but as a way of existing in the world, marked by singularities and shaped by social factors such as class, race, gender, and age. Across the chapters, the study discusses access, institutional, affective, territorial, and epistemological arrangements that shape the construction of lives with disability. Anthropology, in this context, does not merely observe—it commits to listening, to presence, and to social transformation—so that we may observe, recognize, and value disability as part of human diversity. Keywords: Anthropology with disability; Intersectionality; Public policies; Education; Health.