Patrícia Rodrigues

Patrícia holds a M.A. in Archaeology and Territory and a B.A. in Archaeology and History from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. During this period, Patricia worked as junior researcher in the Coimbra UNESCO World Heritage Center. Her research focused on medieval ceramics, urban archaeology and landscape analysis. In Brazil, she completed a year of graduate course work in the University of São Paulo’s Archaeology and Ethnography program, focusing on Indigenous Archaeology and ethnoarchaeological approaches. She has since been working as a researcher and scientific coordinator of Indigenous cultural preservation projects for the Brazilian Mandkind Institute, a NGO devoted to heritage valorization.

At Notre Dame, Patrícia’s research assesses the historical and anthropological bases for indigenous claims to territory and legal protection of archaeological sites and ecological resources in Brazil. She addresses problems in the politics of ethnic identity and academia’s role in the enforcement of indigenous rights to land and cultural self-determination, through an integrative approach to time, materiality and discourse. Specifically, she is interested in exploring cultural conceptions of time, space and materiality, narrative means of representing those concepts and how these relate to archaeological heritage culturally specific historicities, group identity construction and intergenerational reproduction in Amerindian societies. Patrícia is a Kellogg Institute PhD Fellow.