Ruth Starkman: How are you liking your move to the Bay? Is there something cool you have found and enjoy?
Stephanie Reist: Moving from Rio de Janeiro to the Bay was a bit of an adjustment but I feel like I am settling in. I recently started singing with the Afro-Colombian marimba band Neblinas del Pacífico (Fogs of the Pacific).The music we play is from the Colombian Pacific Coast. It has been really fun and an interesting way to reconnect with some of my broader research on Black cultural production in the Americas, as my research was on Colombia before switching to Brazil.
RS: Could you share more about your course The Rhetorics of Meritocracy and Deservedness in an Unequal Society?
SR: Stanford students (and instructors) obviously have some investment in notions of meritocracy—they've worked hard to get into a prestigious institution. But they are also highly skeptical of the concept. I think some students want to use their RBAs to figure out a way to have a "pure" or "true" meritocracy, and I sympathize a lot with wanting that. But they quickly end up questioning the very notion of hierarchy or the types of criteria used to evaluate people in a variety of fields. Something I want to explore more in future iterations of the course is deservedness (we get stuck on merit), so the question of deserving welfare or even deserving the right to vote.
RS: What kinds of student projects are particularly engaging in your course?
SR: I feel like I learn so much from my students teaching this course. Many students gravitate to topics that impact them, like college admissions, NIL (name, image and likeness) for college athletes (I enjoy having a decent number of student athletes in my sections) or scoring a job at a consulting firm. I had one student write about how the Department of Energy decides which clean energy companies and initiatives to subsidize, another about how hierarchies are established in prisons, and a student is now working on whether patents are good for innovation or not.
RS: Tell us about your research on Black feminisms and cultural production in Rio de Janeiro and your documentary.
SR: I very much consider the documentary O custo da oportunidade (The Cost of Opportunity) that I made with Brazilian rapper and filmmaker Dudu de Morro Agudo as one of the highlights of researching and living in Rio de Janeiro. It came out of a collaborative research project between Duke University and the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) on the expansion of access to higher education in Brazil through racial and socioeconomic quotas and the construction of new universities campuses, which was the case for the Multidisciplinary Institute of the UFRRJ where our research was carried out. The Multidisciplinary Institute had been constructed in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro known as the Baixada Fluminense in 2006, during Lula's second term as President.
While Rio is known for its inequality, embodied in the hilltop favelas typically built by the residents themselves with little government investment that overlook the formal city, a lot of poor, predominately Black Brazilians live in similarly neglected peripheries far from services like higher ed institutions. The Brazilian feminist Lélia Gonzalez was instrumental to my thinking about the social and geographic place of Blackness and Black people in Brazil. Brazilian racism, which can seem more indirect than its US counterpart, is often maintained through de facto segregation. For example, access to higher education in Brazil had long been 'perverse' in that the free public institutions were (and often still are) located in city centers, and admissions to a course of study was based on very rigorous, unstandardized tests, so rich kids that went to private schools were the ones getting into free public federal universities.
The Black movement was instrumental in pushing for quotas, which began to be implemented at various universities in the 2000s and were adopted at the federal level in 2012. A lot of research on access to higher ed rightly focuses on quotas and is concerned with the question of working class, Black youth going to the formerly very white and wealthy space of the university, but we were also concerned with the question of universities going to Black and working class spaces, to the urban peripheries. The project itself was the fruit of this change, with some faculty at Brazilian universities –like my dear colleagues at UFFRJ– taking the cultural and intellectual production of Black people from the peripheries seriously and as being worthy of academic inquiry. The students we interviewed in the film worked on the research project with us, as many had projects on the Baixada Fluminense. The highlight was that many brought a parent to be interviewed, so we could document that this was a profound generational shift in terms of opportunity. When I was still in Rio, we would often show O custo da oportunidade at community events to encourage high school students to pursue a college education.
Are there any new research projects or courses you’re excited to develop in the future?
I am trying to rediscover myself a bit as a writer rather than a researcher. I think as someone who has worked across a variety of disciplines and media, I find academic research constraining, so I have been working on things that feel more creative. I'm dabbling a bit in creative nonfiction and memoir—mostly around grief since the passing of my father and now navigating my mother's declining health—though coming from academic writing it's scary to write about myself and the people I know and love. I also still maintain my relationship with Brazil and was there this summer and am hoping to work on some literary translations having mostly done academic ones in the past.
