Gabriela Leal

Gabriela's PhD research is funded by a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia scholarship. She collaborates with the City Anthropology Study Group (GEAC-USP), integrates the Etno.Urb network and organizes CAU (Urban Anthropology Collective).

Gabriela also has an MA in Social Anthropology and a BA in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo. Her research delves into the uses of urban spaces, knowledge regimes, activism, peripheries, hip hop culture, and expressive practices. Engaging in independent visual arts and fanzines projects, Leal has collaborated with various art collectives and received cultural promotion grants in São Paulo, Brazil.

She is the author of “Cidade: modos de ler usar e se apropriar. A São Paulo do graffiti” (2023). The book's main objective is to investigate the uses of the street by graffiti practices in São Paulo and the possibilities for the city that emerge from this interaction. Therefore, while graffiti practices occupy a central place as a focus of analysis and reflection, they are also taken as a window for thinking (together) and producing knowledge about the urban. And in 2024, she co-edited the book “(Re)Encantar o mapa: fantasmas, imaginários, prefigurações”. To (re)enchant the map means questioning the cartographic reason and unleashing a different imagination through the map’s evocative, prefigurative and strategic power as an instrument for producing new affective, aesthetic and political connections. This collective work presents a set of reflections and radical experiences on cartographic (re)enchantment through academic, activist and artistic perspectives.