Undergraduate Fellow
Kaína is social worker, researcher, and arts worker in her fourth year of studies in Religion & Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. As a social worker, she oversaw the coordination of programs to support over 200 2SLGBTQ+ newcomers settle in Toronto during the pandemic. As a researcher, Kaína disseminated the experiences and knowledge-bases of Trans Spanish-speaking migrants (part of the Faculty of Social Work's Tacit Knowledge Project) as well as documented experiences of Spanish-speaking domestic workers in Toronto (with the Faculty of Information). In between studies and social work, she does independent arts-based research on Yoruba religions while studying and training in her culture’s folkloric dance.
Fellowship Project: Cosmovisions of a Travesti: Religious Expression Amongst Trans Women in Brazil’s Underworld
Kaína's project is a semiotic study of how “Travestis” in Northeast Brazil engage with spirituality through documenting and disseminating their cultural and material productions for the spirits they venerate in the subaltern spaces they are bound to. Transgender women in Latin America have historically found comfort in Afro-Indigenous spiritual traditions, but efforts to institutionalize these religious practices pose a challenge for those with complex social positionalities, birthing innovative spiritual expressions in Brazil’s social underworlds. Engaging as both a Trans Woman from Latin America and as someone who grew up in these spiritual-cultural systems, Kaína’s intention is to thoughtfully encourage critical discourse around what constitutes spirituality, religion, and profanity in the context of multi-layered existences of those living in socio-cultural peripheries.