Marina Ribeiro Romero

Marina Ribeiro Romero is an MA candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Campinas and a Student Visitor at the Oxford Department of International Development. Her current research examines the relationships between traditional knowledge communities—particularly Indigenous, quilombola, and riverine populations—and higher education in Brazil, focusing on a university programme that includes traditional knowledge holders as professors in undergraduate courses.

Drawing on ethnographic methodologies, her work investigates how these knowledge holders engage with academic institutions, and their presence within the university reshapes understandings of knowledge production, expertise, and pedagogical practice. Rather than treating these encounters as one-directional, her research emphasizes mutual transformations, negotiations, and frictions that emerge when community-based epistemologies enter academic spaces within institutional frameworks.

Her work is especially concerned with the tensions and possibilities generated by these interactions, exploring questions of epistemic plurality and the role of universities in fostering more inclusive and socially grounded forms of knowledge. By focusing on everyday dynamics of teaching, authority, and translation between different knowledge systems, she seeks to understand how these relations are constituted in practice.

Alongside her academic research, she works in archival organization, conservation, and restoration, which informs her interest in memory, heritage, and oral and cultural traditions.