School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies (UoE) and co-director of the Race.ED Network. My academic background started at the Black Consciousness Organisation (Núcleo de Consciência Negra na USP - NCN-USP), an NGO founded by the Black Movement in Brazil that offered free preparatory courses to enter university, in 2002. From the antiracist curriculum developed by NCN-USP, I could engage with important references and activism that shape and inspire my teaching and research projects to this day and start university with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to make sure I could keep studying in the first year of the programme in Sociology and Politics. 

In 2007 I was awarded my BA in Sociology and Politics from the Foundation-School of Sociology and Politics of Sao Paulo (FESPSP) with an anthropological dissertation discussing racialised sexual-affective encounters and racism in samba parties in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I found my passion in developing ethnographic work and understanding how we build and validate knowledge through research. I graduated in the Master programme of Sociological Research from the University of Barcelona, a programme grounded in methodology and new approaches to Sociology when I discussed racialisation, affect and love, whiteness and coloniality in relationships between women who love women or self-identified lesbians. I studied my PhD at the University of Leeds, when I researched the affective economy present in the diasporic experience of Black Brazilian women weaving their possibilities to make a home in the UK and negotiate their meaning of Blackness with the colonial British setting. My research projects are now interested in exchanging knowledge and generating dialogues from transnational antiracist solidarity. 

My experience in Education is from interdisciplinary perspectives, having taught people as young as 2 months old to adults over 90 years old, involving music, Human Rights, adult literacy, horse-riding and sexual health. All these national and international experiences set the path for me to work with the intersections of racialisation politics and race, multiple constructions of gender, formations of nation and nationality, migration, the Black diaspora, discourse, and the affective economy. My background is rooted in the Black Movement in Brazil, samba community and quilombo territory. I believe in the transformative power of education to create means to organise and develop strategies for promoting social justice and societies with loving, ethical and liberating experiences.

Latest Publications

Bento, K. (2025) Decolonising minds in higher education: an ode to Black ancestrality in four movements. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2591818

Bento, K. and Nascimento, A. P.  (2025) “R-existence e cura em território aquilombado: O Covid nos fez repensar nossas relações”, Revista Fórum Identidades. Itabaiana-SE, 40(1), p. 145–166. doi: https://doi.org/10.47250/forident.v40n1.p145-166.

Bento, K. (2025) ‘Occupations of language: queer praxis grounding decolonial approaches’, In: J. Fúnez-Flores, A.C. Díaz Beltrán, S.J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. Bakshi, A. Lao-Montes, and F. Rios, eds. The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory.  Sage Publications, pp. 94-111. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781036204358.n7