Education & Talks

Widely recognized for her contributions as an educator, critical thinker, and HIV rights advocate, Naya believes that borders and discrimination generate new forms of language and identity by default. By refusing colonial language and its mannerisms, she has not only turned “amiga” into Berlin slang, but also created a glossary of words that tackle censorship and epistemic exclusion. She is also among the few public figures and academics from her region of Brazil to speak in her regional dialect across academic, institutional, and public spaces, challenging the linguistic hierarchies that privilege standardized language as the legitimate language of knowledge.

Her practice also questions the role of politeness within anti-colonial studies and critical thinking. She considers excessive politeness to be potentially violent when it sanitizes or softens the violent nature of colonialism itself. In this sense, politeness can become a form of gaslighting: shifting attention away from the structures and histories of violence by demanding that they be discussed in language that remains comfortable, civilized, and institutionally acceptable. For Naya, intimacy is essential to this process.

Naya became known for discussing complex subjects in deliberately accessible, sometimes vulgar language, challenging the assumption that intellectual discourse must be sophisticated in order to be legitimate, and insisting that vulnerability is essential. Topics such as gender, race, and colonialism are inherently intimate, as they evoke trauma, fear, and shame. Her approach therefore insists on creating forms of discourse that can hold this intimacy rather than distancing it through academic language and institutional conventions.