I spent two weeks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this summer as part of the JHU MSH-Fiocruz Institute Summer School to support my research into racial environmental justice in the comparative perspective. For the first week, I attended the Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History Society Symposium (SOLCHA) and for the second week I attended a class co-taught by Fiocruz and Hopkins faculty on medicine, science, technology, and the environment.

As an American-Brazilian, I have always been interested in comparative study between my two countries. Last spring, I completed a project on the different processes of racialization in the U.S. and Brazil, and this fall I conducted ethnographic research on environmental imperialism in Ecuador. My time in Brazil allowed me to marry these two concepts together as I studied how racialization affects the search for environmental justice, as minority communities are unequally impacted by environmental harm.

Cultural exchange with Brazilian students was the most impactful part of my time at Fiocruz. It is one thing to read papers on petro-corruption, but it is another thing entirely to swap stories at the lunch table. On a visit to a water treatment plant, we were shown a map of communities the enterprise had brought water to for the first time. My friend nudged me and pointed to one of the highlighted regions, Baixada Fluminese, and said “that’s where I live.” It was so jarring that we could be in the same class, learning the same things and yet one of us had lived a life entirely with tap water you could drink, while another one was from a community where some houses did not even have running water. The classes with Fiocruz students were equally enlightening. We discussed photos from UN efforts to eradicate malaria and dengue deep in the Amazon and how imperialism impacted tropical disease treatment. We were instructed in the ways medicine negatively affects the environment and how deeply embedded race is in all our present-day systems, from agriculture to governance.

American researchers and academics are still reckoning with an era where science is under attack from the very institutions that are supposed to fund research. To combat this, we should follow the Brazilian model. Fiocruz Institute is the premier public health institution in Latin America, but instead of simply being a university or laboratory, it is a public-private partnership that functions as Johns Hopkins and the Center for Disease Control at the same time. Fiocruz maintains just on its main campus a hospital, the national vaccine production facility, biological research facilities, graduate programs in the humanities, museums, libraries, youth education, a castle, an archaeological site, and so much more. I am neither a historian nor an anthropologist by training, but this experience showed me just how important interdisciplinary research is. American researchers and academics can no longer afford to silo humanities, medicine, or hard science. We must all be educated in all of them and support each other so that we can effectively combat the threat to education and research we currently face.