Laura Vaz-Jones

I am a Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Toronto. My research examines how the history of plantation production and power relations in Brazil’s Northeast has shaped the course of urbanization in Salvador, Bahia—one of the earliest and most important colonial outposts in the Americas. I focus on the role of Black women in the making of the city, viewing their social reproductive labour as constitutive of urban life and space. I also interrogate how these women contested dominant power structures and carved out their own spaces of freedom, fugitivity, and life-making in the city as domestic workers and street vendors.

Publications

Mollett, Sharlene, Vaz-Jones, Laura, and Lydia Delicado Moratalla. 2020. “Feminist Political Ecologies: Race, Bodies and the Human.” In The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, edited by Linda Johnston, Elizabeth Olson, Joseli Maria Silva, Amindita Datta, and Peter Hopkins. London: Taylor and Francis.

Vaz-Jones, Laura. 2018. “Struggles over Land, Livelihood and Future Possibilities:
Reframing Displacement through Feminist Political Ecology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (3): 711.