Fellowships as Commons: Governance, Refusal, and Community Archives in Brazil

Abstract

This article develops fellowship-as-commons as a transdisciplinary research methodology grounded in Afro-Brazilian community archives and Black Atlantic knowledge networks. Drawing on long-term engagement with the Zumví Photographic Archive in Salvador, Bahia, terreiro-based memory practices and the transnational trajectories of community research fellows, it argues that the central challenge in participatory research is not participation itself but the terms and structures through which knowledge circulation is held and redistributed. Latin American scholarship on transdisciplinarity emphasizes dialogue and co-production, while fellowships, grants, mobility and publication structures often remain individually controlled, reproducing extractive relations. Fellowship-as-commons reframes these resources as shared research infrastructure, in which decisions about mobility, authorship, visibility and knowledge sharing are negotiated through community-centered protocols rather than academic default. Situated within traditions of Investigación-Acción Participativa, decolonial epistemic struggle and Lélia Gonzalez's concept of Amefricanidade, the article shows how community archives function as commons through constraint, refusal and ethical boundary-making, particularly in religious contexts where visual ancestralities are governed rather than freely accessible. It argues that sustainability in transdisciplinary research depends on the material redistribution of academic resources and on shared terms for deciding whose knowledge circulates, not on intention alone.