Angela Leocata
Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year
Navigating Aspirational Trajectories: Underemployment in Minas Gerais, Brazil
Vale do Rio Doce, Minas Gerais, known as Brazil’s “emigrant capital,” has endured an underemployment crisis, with a quarter of its population underemployed. The main demographic affected is young, recently graduated women. Building from anthropology that urges attention outside of the receiving-nation context – typically, the United States – to engage how displacements, those national and occupational, shape sending-nations, my research is concerned with college-educated women who work in what are largely perceived as “unskilled” service positions. Toward these ends, it inquires into barriers to gender equality, as related to class and ethno-racialization, among women, who, despite their educational background, remain underemployed.
Angela Leocata, Department of Anthropology
Angela Leocata is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology. She received her BA summa cum laude in anthropology with a secondary in global health and health policy from Harvard University. She is driven by questions of subjectivity, suffering and care as they are experienced in daily life. Her graduate dissertation takes up questions of generational immobility, underemployment, and displacement among women in Vale do Rio Doce, Minas Gerais, Brazil’s “emigrant capital.”
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