Gabriela Leal

Gabriela's research sits at the intersection of Anthropology, Hip Hop Studies, and Urban Studies, with a sustained focus on peripheral territories, expressive practices, and knowledge production in Brazilian and Portuguese cities.

 

At the centre of her doctoral research is the question of how rap — and in particular the practices of women rappers in the peripheries of São Paulo and Lisbon, including rap kriolu — operates as a site where complex knowledge, interpretations, and understandings about urban life are created, recorded, and shared. Her central argument is that the knowledge regime produced by this aesthetic and urban practice not only captures past memories and present events but also fosters the capacity to imagine other possible futures. In a counter-colonial endeavour, she seeks to recognise rap's paradigms, models, and theories as potential sources of innovation for Urban Studies — not to validate their epistemological scope, which others have already done, but to intervene in, destabilise, and contest concepts such as “periphery" within dominant urban traditions, making space for alternative ontologies and spatial grammars.

 

A broader thread across her work concerns the relationship between expressive practices and urban space. From graffiti and pixação as appropriation and resignification of the street to rap as articulation of peripheral subjectivities, she is interested in how cultural practices become modes of reading, contesting, and reimagining the city. This extends to methodological commitments as well: I engage with experimental, collaborative, and artistically-informed forms of knowledge production — including fanzines, creative cartography, and collective artistic practices — as both epistemological and political gestures.