Critical pedagogies from the mangrove edge: Learning within multispecies worlds

Recent work in environmental humanities, critical geography and anthropology has emphasised the necessity of understanding forests as relational ecologies. Rather than viewing forests as discrete, extractable resources or isolated biomes, scholars have turned toward conceptualizations of forests as dynamic assemblages of human and non-human actors entangled in historically and politically charged processes (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015). This shift has also influenced environmental pedagogy (Lynch & Mannion, Reference Lynch and Mannion2021) and triggered critical reflections from Black, Indigenous and feminist standpoints, who criticise the ahistorical and power-blind view on forests (Bruno, Reference Bruno2022). According to Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak:

Building on this ontological rethinking, critical forest pedagogies (Rousell & Tran, Reference Rousell and Tran2024) have emerged as an attempt to engage forests not only as sites of ecological importance but also as pedagogical terrains and teachers through which complex interspecies relations, colonial histories and environmental politics may be learned and unlearned.

This strand of scholarship aligns with a broader concern in more-than-human studies and environmental education to rethink how knowledge is formed in relation to “nature” in general, and forest ecologies in particular (Beavington, Reference Beavington2021). It intersects with feminist and decolonial critiques of environmental management that have long emphasised the limitations of technoscientific and extractivist paradigms (Serafini, Reference Serafini2021). In this context, several scholars have advocated for a pedagogy and ethic of immanent care, an approach that values situated, heterogeneous and relational knowledge practices in different mangrove forests around the world (i.e., Milberg Muñiz et al., Reference Milberg Muñiz, Ludwig and El-Hani2024; Pauwelussen, Reference Pauwelussen2016). These perspectives call for the integration of diverse forms of understanding, including scientific ecological knowledge, Indigenous epistemologies and community-based practices of care for forested environments. Such integration is increasingly viewed as critical for reorienting environmental education away from prescriptive models and toward place-based, co-constitutive emancipatory engagements with forest life and also to strengthen the political struggles of benefiting marginalised communities (Milberg Muñiz et al., Reference Milberg Muñiz, Ludwig and El-Hani2024).

Despite this theoretical expansion, the literature on forest pedagogies remains largely terrestrial in focus, tending to privilege dense inland forests as archetypal sites of learning. Wetland forests such as mangroves are rarely addressed explicitly, and when they are, they are often subsumed under broader discussions of marine conservation, coastal management or ecosystems (i.e., Owuor et al., Reference Owuor, Mulwa, Otieno, Icely and Newton2019, Reference Owuor, Santos, Otieno, Mazzuco, Iheaturu and Bernardino2024) and cultural services (Huxham et al., Reference Huxham, Dencer-Brown, Diele, Kathiresan, Nagelkerken, Wanjiru and Rivera-Monroy2017; Moore et al., Reference Moore, Hierro, Mir and Stewart2022). While Web of Science keyword search for “ecosystem services” and “mangroves” spells out 2,106 results, with a sharp increase in published papers after 2015 and almost completely published in natural sciences, the keywords “cultural services” and “mangroves” give 146 results. Among the latter there appear a few slightly more critical reflections, pointing to the power structures that valorise some stakeholders’ “cultural values” over those of others (Nyangoko et al., Reference Nyangoko, Berg, Mangora, Gullström and Shalli2021; Scott et al., Reference Scott, Mach, Lucas and Myers2024). However, less economically oriented, utilitarian and nature-exploitative visions on mangroves are strongly underrepresented: Only 148 articles are placed within critical social science analyses of injustices, gendered or racialised inequities, and marginalisation.

This relative neglect is noteworthy given that mangroves complicate neat distinctions between land and sea, as well as between forest and non-forest ecologies. As hybrid ecosystems shaped by tidal flows, salinity gradients and sedimentary change, mangroves resist dominant ecological categorizations of in-habitability and present distinct challenges and opportunities for pedagogical engagement: Mangroves are also places to cultivate sustainable, respectful and caring forms co-habitation that exceed economic, human-benefits centred categorisation and containment. In addition, mangrove forests have long been discarded as rather hotbeds of epidemic diseases as well as remained less recognised as historically important sites of decolonial struggles, being places of retreat and resistance for marginalised communities (Carney, Reference Carney2017).

This oversight becomes more striking in light of the diverse social and political dynamics that characterise mangrove regions. In Brazil (Matos Viegas & Mota Cardoso, Reference Matos Viegas, Mota Cardoso, High and Costa2025), Guinea-Bissau (Sousa et al., Reference Sousa, Dabó and Luz2025) and elsewhere (see Motta, Reference Motta2023), mangrove forests are actively cared for and inhabited by a wide range of communities and institutions: Indigenous, Black, traditional and fishing communities, as well as conservation NGOs and, more controversially, oil consortia engaging in greenwashing. These overlapping and sometimes contradictory logics of care and management point to the entanglement of mangrove ecologies in contested regimes of knowledge, resource governance and environmental justice. While some authors have advocated for the development of new, mangrove-specific education models to “transform coastal communities into sustainable mangrove conservation societies” (Gunawan et al., Reference Gunawan, Basyuni, Suharti, Kustanti, Wahyuni, Arifanti, Yeny, Affandi, Zuhriana, Lastini, Herawati, Riswati and Effendi2025), such approaches risk reinforcing top-down, technocratic and even patriarchal models of pedagogy. They may overlook the existing, often long-standing ways in which local communities have already developed attuned, respectful and ecologically embedded modes of living and learning with and in mangrove environments.

For centuries, the communities living in mangrove estuaries have been stigmatised by elites as “backward” or “unproductive.” In colonial discourse, the abundance of food in these landscapes was interpreted as harmful, supposedly fostering laziness and a lack of ambition (Sofiatti, Reference Sofiatti and Turra2023). This moral judgment fell primarily upon predominantly Black and Indigenous populations and on a way of life sustained by practices such as artisanal fishing, the gathering of shellfish and crabs, and plant-based extractivism, including the collection of firewood, leaves and resins for domestic and commercial use. These forms of labour ensured (and still ensure) food autonomy and flexibility in the use of time, features that stood in sharp contrast to the ideals of productivity, discipline and subordination imposed first by the colonial order and, later, by the urban capitalist logic (Sofiatti, Reference Sofiatti and Turra2023; Câmara do Vale, Reference Camara do Vale and Turra2023).

This raises critical questions for forest pedagogies more broadly: To what extent are local communities’ practices, knowledges and ecological ethics recognised within educational and conservation frameworks? How do these align or diverge from state and NGO agendas? And how might critical pedagogies not merely disseminate ecological information but engage reflexively with the relational and political dimensions of such knowledge?

One way this has been approached in environmental literature is through the recognition of sentinel species, organisms that signal environmental degradation through their health or population dynamics. In mangrove environments, certain crab species have been identified as biological indicators of microplastic densities and pollution from fossil fuel residues and heavy metals (Fernandez-Cadena et al., Reference Fernández-Cadena, Andrade, Silva-Coello and de la Iglesia2014; Araujo Junior et al., Reference Araújo Júnior, Ferreira, Suarez-Abelenda, Nóbrega, Albuquerque, Bezerra and Otero2016). Yet beyond their instrumental role in scientific monitoring, such species can also be understood, following more-than-human approaches (van Patter et al., Reference van Patter, Turnbull and Dodsworth2022), as informants within an ecological and pedagogical field, signalling not only biophysical change but shifts in interspecies relations, community knowledges and local cosmopolitics, an approach we expand on in the later section on filmmaking, and our film project “Listen to Uçá, the Crab” (Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025). Attending such signals requires critical pedagogies that are sensitive to both scientific insight and embodied, experiential knowledge, especially in contexts of chronic pollution.

Mangroves are riparian zones of struggle with “unruly edges” (Tsing, Reference Tsing2012). Their multispecies communities of trees, crabs, fishers are always in-between land and water, disrupting a “dry” versus “wet” forest dichotomy. When expanded to include mangrove environments, critical forest pedagogies may provide a way to localise these planetary concerns through lived, relational engagements with polluted ecologies. In this regard, the project “riparian struggles” as developed by two of the authors (Kemmer and Baxter) in collaboration with riverine communities around the planet offers a critical pedagogical framework for recognising, learning and sharing local community knowledge between sites from which political intervention and transformations emerge. Riparian Struggles (riparianstruggles.org) refers to a transdisciplinary network of academics, activists, civil society engaged in socio-ecological conflicts over and around bodies water and the self-organized infrastructure that circulates and translates knowledge between communities. This mutual learning supported by a digital platform alongside a series of encounters, experiments and joint actions enacts solidarity between diverse watery sites of struggle. Through recipe writing, tactics developed locally are protocoled, translated, shared and put into action around the planet. This critical pedagogy is guided by three strategies: 1. Corresponding, or multispecies correspondences which opens new channels of communications between humans and between humans and nonhumans. Solidarity is built through recognition and empathy. Corresponding in this way suggests finding likeness in unlikely places while attending to the differences. 2. Evidencing is to build arguments against pollution, through “acts of noticing” or “standing by”; to advocate in the name of those river communities and river beings who have become hidden or silenced, and to un-earth ecologies of resistance around water bodies towards a horizon of care, repair and healing. 3. Circulating is to keep moving, to keep changing, to resist stratification; it suggests a continuous process of making, sharing and translating knowledge towards (political) action and change.

These strategies guide a critical, transdisciplinary, transformative and place-responsive approach to mutual learning and solidarity. Transdisciplinary pedagogy, in particular, opens space for collaborations across academic, artistic and community domains, creating hybrid forms of inquiry that respond to both ecological complexity and political urgency (Goralnik et al., Reference Goralnik, Kelly, O’Connell, Nelson and Schulze2021). Place-responsive education, as developed in the context of environmental learning in the school systems, emphasises the importance of grounded, experiential knowledge and community engagement to redirect caring responsibilities of young adults to their familiar environments (Dickinson, Reference Dickinson2011). Turning towards a critical recognition of diverse knowledge practices and registers, environmental education, when placed in forests, has also been defined as a field to consider indigenous perspectives (Rousell & Tran, Reference Rousell and Tran2024). When brought together, these approaches enable forms of learning that are not only reflective but materially embedded and ethically attuned.

Within this context, visual and sensory methods, especially film, have emerged as important tools for critical environmental pedagogy (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2024). There is a small body of work on resistance filmmaking in mangrove regions, where visual media has been used to document and resist territorial dispossession, ecological violence and state neglect. Building on this rather recent tradition, our own experiences with collaborative filmmaking in mangrove areas have aimed to reflect, not represent, the complex entanglements of communities, species and toxic ecologies. These films serve both as modes of research and as pedagogical artefacts, used in university classrooms and community settings to prompt reflection on knowledge production, ecological degradation and more-than-human futures.

While film can render visible the lived textures of mangrove life and pollution, it also raises methodological and ethical questions about authorship, representation and the limits of anthropological engagement, as we will expand on in the following and before turning to such film experiments as bases for transdisciplinary learning.

Mangrove, film and resistance: A historical account

Film and filming have been strong components within anti-colonial struggles, and mangroves have played a decisive role as sites of ecology-specific knowledge production. In this section, we will historically explore connections between filmmaking, mangroves as sites of struggle and resistance, and critical (forest) pedagogies.

During the transatlantic colonial era, forests and remote regions were often places where the fragility of colonial regimes became evident. Efforts were directed towards expanding territorial control, exploiting the labour force, native knowledge and mineral resources and other raw materials. Such settler colonialism was associated with a ‘conquest of nature’ and flanked by Christianisation and the mission of civilisation (Bandeira Jerónimo, Reference Bandeira Jerónimo and Rodrigues2019). The oppression of local knowledge and belief systems, criticised by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Reference wa Thiong’o1986), among others. It was evident in the context of late Portuguese capitalism in the authoritarian Estado Novo, for example in the Indigenato system (Bandeira Jerónimo, Reference Bandeira Jerónimo and Rodrigues2019) cementing the distinction between civilizados and indígenas, and introducing mandatory monocultures, the obligation to learn Portuguese, and to conform to Christian values and social manners (though only a tiny minority of the Black population was granted the status of civilizados in the 1950s).

With the onset of anti-colonial struggles in Angola, Guinea-Bissau (Havik, Reference Havik and Rodrigues2019), Cape Verde and Mozambique in the early 1960s, national self-determination became central. These movements operated through international networks, often from neighbouring countries. For instance, FRELIMO used bases in Tanzania to wage guerrilla war against Portuguese forces. In Guinea-Bissau, the PAIGCV leveraged the mangrove forests along the coast for resistance, where Amílcar Cabral also envisioned alternatives to colonial cash crops like peanuts (Saraiva, Reference Saraiva2022, p. 600; Temudo & Cabral, Reference Temudo and Cabral2017; Temudo, Reference Temudo2011).

As independence movements gained territory, areas beyond colonial urban centres became testing grounds for new national structures. Key aspects of these “liberated zones” included schools and training for cadres, who would serve both in combat and in future state roles. Education in these zones, often held in forested or mangrove areas, was aimed at decolonising the mind, in the spirit of wa Thiong’o (Reference wa Thiong’o1986). Figures like Amílcar Cabral (Saraiva, Reference Saraiva2022) and Eduardo Mondlane promoted education rooted in local identity and knowledge, rejecting colonial thought systems. The broader goal was to extend this anti-colonial education across territories still claimed by colonial powers until 1973/1974. However, prolonged conflicts and the rise of socialist regimes after independence hindered these ideals. As a result, education remains a contested and unresolved aspiration in these nations, especially in coastal regions with mangrove forests that are now facing new threats like climate change and persistent economic marginalisation.

The independence movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique opposed colonial cinema and its ideological underpinnings (Bloom, Reference Bloom2008; Diawara, Reference Diawara1992) with their own films, whose production was supported by European television stations and solidarity movements (Andrade-Watkins, Reference Andrade-Watkins1995). Particularly, FRELIMO in Mozambique and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGCV) used film as a tool in their struggle against Portuguese colonial rule (Diawara, Reference Diawara1992, p. 91). They served to inform audiences in Europe and the US about the Portuguese colonial empire and functioned as a means of information for the training of guerrilla fighters and the illiterate population (Diawara, Reference Diawara1992, p. 89). For example, Madina-Boe (1968) by Cuban director José Massip showed the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Guinea-Bissau in the spirit of Third Cinema, with an emphasis on political education, military training and the leadership of Amílcar Cabral (Laranjeiro, Reference Laranjeiro, Blum, Kiriakou, Mourre, Basto, Guidi, Pauthier, Rillon, Roy and Vezzadini2021). These film documents provide an impressive picture of the political and cinematic efforts of the independence movements to create an image of themselves as a nation, which in the present day motivates African-European collaborations such as the Animated Archive Project (César et al., Reference César, Hering and Rito2017; da Silva, Reference da Silva2016).

Several current projects address the connection between education and pedagogy in the context of the anti-colonial African struggles. These include the artistic projects of Filipa César and Sonia Vaz Borges: The film Mangrove School (Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, 2022) is based on Borges’ research on the anti-colonial efforts of the PAIGCV in Guinea-Bissau in 1963–1978 to achieve the decolonisation of knowledge through a novel education concept. The film is interested in both the mangrove ecosystem and the reconstruction of a school from the time of the anti-colonial struggle. It is about understanding “nature as an infrastructure for learning” (César, Reference César2019) building on Sonia Vaz Borges’ concept of “walking archives” (2019, pp. 19–20). During the armed struggle, schools were established in Guinea and the neighbouring countries of Guinea-Conakry and Senegal, many of them near villages and in the forest using local materials from the mangroves trees. Their “fluctuating architecture” was meant to resist both changing tides and, in the event of attacks by the Portuguese air force, the structure could be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. Paulo Freire (Reference Freire1978), being an advisor to the Ministry of Education in independent Guinea-Bissau, reported on this radical pedagogical practice that transformed the forest into a “liberated zone” and thus as a location for militant education (Vaz Borges and César, Reference Vaz Borges and César2022).

Hence, these films situated critical pedagogy among the alluvial space of the mangroves, shifting their meaning from conquered territories and mastering of nature, to a form of knowledge production that coexists with these specific ecologies. As one person who experienced several years of education in a mangrove school put it: “We studied in the mud” (Vaz Borges and César, Reference Vaz Borges and César2022) (Mangue Mud, Magé).

Mangue Mud, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Boat on the Surui River, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Film-making as sensory tool within political-ecological struggle: The mangroves of the Surui River, Rio de Janeiro

In the Brazilian context, to speak of collaborative research is also to acknowledge the weight of long-standing demands articulated by Black, Indigenous, quilombola and riverside communities toward academics who enter their territories. Among these demands, one of the most enduring is the expectation of devolutiva (giving back), understood not as a mere procedural formality, but as a sustained commitment to reciprocity that extends beyond the written record and materialises in concrete forms of contribution. In the case of the caranguejeiros of the Rio Suruí, located in the Recôncavo of Guanabara Bay, this expectation was no exception (Boat on the Surui River, Magé). From the outset of fieldwork, which began in January 2023 and still ongoing, we were confronted with the question: How will you give back, and what will you give? This query, far from referring solely to the delivery of reports or the presentation of results, carried the force of an ethical and political summons. In this context, to “give back” meant to engage actively in the fronts of struggle against the advance of the petrochemical industry over the mangroves, as well as the cultivation of political-affective alliances capable of disrupting the silence that obfuscates the destructive effects as it is rendered invisible.

The mangroves of the Rio Suruí and the entire Recôncavo of Guanabara have been historically inhabited by Black populations who, since the sixteenth century, have learned to read and live within these unstable environments by mobilising knowledge brought from the African continent and techniques inherited from the Temiminó Indigenous peoples. Although these were ecosystems abundant in fish, crustaceans and molluscs, to the newly arrived colonisers the mangroves appeared as a profoundly unfamiliar world. European travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recorded, with astonishment, trees whose leaves “expelled” salt and siribeira roots which, emerging from the mud, resembled claws or tentacles of shifting ground. They marvelled at roots encrusted with oysters and described animals never before encountered, such as the guaiamum crab, an azure creature which, according to the chronicler Fernão Cardim, is so large that “a man’s leg fits into its mouth; they are good to eat; when there is thunder, they come out of their burrows and make such a loud commotion with one another that there have been people who ran to fetch their weapons, thinking they were enemies” (Soffiati Reference Sofiatti and Turra2023, pp. 23–25).

The mangroves of the Suruí River have undergone different political and economic cycles, always shaped by their proximity to what was then the capital of Brazil, the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, monocultures of sugarcane and coffee, for example, introduced new pressures on their resources. Also in the eighteenth century, mangrove timber was extensively exploited in brickworks, intensifying the process of forest degradation. In the nineteenth century, the region gained importance for the Portuguese Court as a strategic point for transporting gold from the state of Minas Gerais, which increased human flows and the demand for port support areas. In the twentieth century, accelerated urbanisation and, above all, the arrival of the petrochemical industry drastically transformed the region: canals were filled in, wetlands drained and industrial pollution began to compromise the reproduction of fish, crustaceans and molluscs. Each of these cycles brought new constraints and challenges for local communities, affecting traditional practices that, for centuries, sustained livelihoods and cultural ties with the mangrove (Fossile et al., Reference Fossile, McGrath, Comes, Villanueva, Sayle, Gilson, Haimovici, Alves, Bartz, Bandeira, Borba, Ferreira and Colonese2024; Lubanco, Reference Lubanco2022) (Crab in its burrow, Magé).

Crab in its burrow, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Rafael, catching a crab by traditional catching technique, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Rafael, the protagonist of the film whose experience will be described below, is the fourth generation of crab harvesters (caranguejeiros) from the Suruí River (Rafael, catching a crab by traditional catching technique, Magé). He inherited knowledge passed down from grandparents and great-grandparents, all of whom were born and raised on the edge of the mangrove. His narrative weaves together continuity and resistance: since childhood, he learned to read the tides, to navigate by the variations in the mud, and to detect the subtle movements that reveal the presence of the uçá crab, the Ucides Cordatus, as classified by the Swedish zoologist and botanist Carl von Linné.

When we began the discussions for the making of the film Listen to Uçá, the Crab (Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025), our initial aim was to highlight how pollution caused by the petrochemical industry affects male and female caranguejo-uçá (mangrove crab) differently, thereby altering the species’ reproductive patterns. However, in conversation with Rafael, he expressed a desire to address another dimension of the problem: accidents involving trucks transporting diesel and gasoline, whose spilled cargo frequently reaches the rivers surrounding the refinery, located only a few kilometres from the Rio Suruí. These events, although directly linked to the production and transportation chain of the petrochemical industry, are rarely acknowledged as an integral part of it. Officially classified as “small-scale accidents,” they tend to be treated as isolated incidents, disconnected from a broader pattern of risks and chronic contamination.

In Rafael’s account for the preparation of the script, we learned that the most recent truck accident on the Suruí River, which had occurred just days before our conversation, coincided exactly with the first day of the so-called defeso of the uçá crab. The defeso, literally: defence, marks the beginning of the species’ reproductive period, a time when the animals are especially vulnerable: moulting their shells and, in the case of females, carrying eggs. This coincidence brought together Rafael’s interest in discussing the impacts of small-scale accidents with our initial proposal to highlight the ways in which pollution interferes with the crab’s life cycles. The event prompted us to reflect on the long-term effects that even so-called “minor” spills can have on fragile and interdependent ecosystems such as mangroves. At the same time, Rafael’s narrative in the film connects the accident to broader historical processes of transformation triggered by the presence and expansion of the petrochemical industry, processes that alter the local temperature and directly affect the reproduction and survival of the uçá crab.

It is important to highlight that, within fishing and crab-harvesting communities, the circulation of information occurs predominantly through oral traditions. On one hand, this reflects the heritage of Black traditions, where oral transmission occupies a central role; on the other, it is shaped by limited access to formal education, due to an unstable and ever-changing work routine, which contributes to a significant incidence of illiteracy. In these contexts, communication through video goes beyond a mere didactic tool: it constitutes a pedagogy aimed at creating and strengthening collective struggle. By combining familiar images, sounds and voices, the film expands the community’s capacity for mobilisation and consolidates a space for knowledge production that not only conveys information but also reaffirms identities, memories and a sense of belonging.

The release of the film on the open-access YouTube channel was a direct request from Rafael and the Association of Crab Fishers and Friends of the Mangrove of Magé (ACAMM), of which he is president. The possibility of sharing a link easily accessible via smartphones proved strategic, generating immediate results in terms of sharing among local groups. One of the audio messages we received in response to the film came from the WhatsApp group Mulheres do Mar em Movimento (Women of the Sea in Motion), which currently has 71 members. In the message, one participant recorded the following account:

We can thus identify four key roles that mangrove film and filmmaking can play in critical pedagogies and local socio-ecological conflicts – riparian struggles. First, film can help engage the wider public in communicating ongoing and persistent forms of toxic exposure, as well as the long-term consequences of seemingly “minor” environmental spillovers. Second, film can serve as a tool for inner-community learning, fostering deeper understanding of the complex interdependencies between species and environments and dialogue within affected groups. Third, it can support political struggles by amplifying voices and raising awareness about critical issues, by evidencing environmental degradation: Mangrove film, and filmmaking, evidences pollution, becoming a standby witness in the ongoing struggle of cohabiting riparian spaces; it supports new forms of correspondence between humans and nonhumans, and circulates knowledge for political action. Fourthly, critical mangrove films act as didactic tools in more formal pedagogical processes (e.g. university courses). It is this fourth aspect of critical mangrove pedagogies we will detail in the penultimate section below.

Male crab Uçá, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Rafael, president of ACAMM, Magé, November 2024. Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Pierobon and Müller2025. Credits: Frank I. Müller.

Teaching mangroves as critical forest places: a didactical approach through Audio–Visual and participatory research

This section outlines a teaching concept designed to enable students to explore mangroves as complex socio-ecological and political sites. The concept is being developed to be implemented at a bilateral post-graduate course that brings together the Masters programme in Sociology at University of São Paulo and in Cultural History at Humboldt University Berlin via a Collaborative Online Learning (COIL) program in the 2025-26 term. However, it can be used in other adjacent humanities and social science disciplines, and even be expanded to non-university classrooms and workshops.

At the core of this teaching approach is the use of said self-produced ethnographic and additional documentary films as the ones discussed in section three on resistance, pedagogies and mangroves in former Portuguese colonies. Together, these films portray mangrove regions as sites of multispecies cohabitation, colonial and postcolonial governance, and environmental conflict. These films are presented in university classrooms in curated fragments, each selected to raise specific socio-ecological and political questions. In the examples presented below, a fragment will show a fisher failing to catch a crab as it hides from warming soils towards deeper layers; or it will thematise a crab’s reproductive journey in a tidal zone shaped by seasonal rhythms and pollution.

The teaching process begins with viewing, first the entire film and hen such selected fragments. Each fragment is discussed in terms of the broader themes it addresses, kicking-off the discussions by suggested sets of research questions (see examples in what follows). Participants of university seminars or community focus groups are also invited to formulate additional specifying questions that arise from these clips and debates, opening space for even more engaged inquiry and responsive to participants’ concerns. These questions might include: How do tides structure human and non-human life in mangrove regions? Or: In what ways do mangrove territories resist or accommodate petrochemical expansion?

Following the discussions, students form small working groups to deepen engagement with specific themes. Each group selects one fragment and begins to gather relevant materials: academic texts, local testimonies, maps, policy documents, visual art and oral histories. The goal is to develop a layered understanding of the topic and its entangled spatial and temporal dynamics. For instance, one group may explore reproductive cycles of crabs in relation to pollution and oil layers and fishing bans, while another investigates administrative reterritorialisation through the creation of Environmental Protection Areas (APAs).

We here illustrate the implementation of this concept with three examples, taken from the film Ouça Uçá. The sets of questions were developed by us and have been first tested at an academic conference presentation in Rio de Janeiro in 2025 (Reunião de Antropologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia, ReACT) and an international postgraduate seminar at the University of São Paulo and Humboldt Universität Berlin, titled Learning with Mangroves, held by Frank I. Müller, Robert Stock and Fraya Frehse. The first fragment focuses on the locations and everydayness of pollution in mangrove ecologies: it depicts the impact of an oil leak on riverine agriculture and spawning areas. A second fragment captures the fishing cooperative, represented by one of its social leaders, navigating between traditional modes of crab catching, changing crab behaviour. The third opens discussion towards the regional development and pollution, looked at through said gendered imbalance in the crab’s toxic exposure.

Research questions (RQs):

1. 1. Why do accidents occur in this specific location?

2. 2. Why were (and continue to be) these accidents so fatal and alarming?

3. 3. Why were these particular loads on the trucks?

These issues are not a matter of coincidence. Students are invited to reflect on the relation between urbanisation and expanding infrastructure and the volatile risk of those “minor” spillover events, mentioned above. The construction of the highway plays a significant role, particularly its steep curves, which increase the likelihood of trucks losing traction. Additionally, broader processes of the growing and economically and politically important petrochemical industries contribute to these accidents. The presence of the petrochemical industry in the area is creating a dynamic where economic development and labour opportunities often come at the expense of environmental health. This results in unregulated pollution, oil spills, and everyday contamination of the surrounding areas.

Several factors contribute to the high fatality rate and the alarming nature of these accidents. One critical element is the sensitivity of the estuary ecosystem, which is highly vulnerable to disruption. Timing and rhythm are also important, tides and reproductive cycles can exacerbate the impact of these events. Gendered aspects of the crab’s body also play a role, particularly the specific vulnerability during the female crab’s pregnancy. State’s complicity with petrochemical industry and an inadequate infrastructural planning can be further explored as also complicating the situation.

Research questions:

1. 1. How does pollution affect the behaviour of crabs?

2. 2. How do fishers know about it/read that behaviour?

3. 3. What is the correlation of minor and major oil leaks and crab behaviour?

The crab is not simply a resource to manage or extract here; the crab is agentic and alive. It teaches, through its changing territorial behaviour about the effects of industrial pollution on the environment and the mangrove forest. As a multi-generational community and represented by a strong association, the ACAMM, cited above, the crab fishers have developed strategies to adapt to the changing conditions of warming soils. As soils are ever more polluted, mangrove trees develop fewer underground roots and consequently, also less expanded treetops, thus offering less shadow. The resulting heated soil then has several effects: It disturbs and changes the reproductive cycle of the crab and pushes it to dig deeper tunnels for refreshment. Responsible for these effects are both oil leaks on major and minor scales, and Rafael speaks about both.

Research questions

• What does the spatial segregation of crab populations teach us about environmental racism and the unequal distribution of industrial risks?

• How does pollution, and its spatial distribution affect the territoriality of crabs, relative to sex?

• And how do these factors impact fisher communities’ organisation and structure?

The contamination is distributed unequally across the Guanabara Bay and its adjacent settlements, reflecting wider forms of historical inequalities. Against this backdrop, the issue here lies with understanding that fisher communities have an intraregional form of communication and organisation, allowing them to recognise and discuss environmental impacts collectively, and possibly to denounce these issues. The fragment speaks about studying the Guanabara Bay in its industrial diversity, pollution and chemical/petro production and contamination and invites the class to explore how crab and fishing communities have adopted and are changing their form of organisation to standby pollution differently.

To add a more future-oriented dimension, students should also discuss, and possibly speculate, about strategies that might be effective in recovering polluted areas. In the context of ‘standing by’ pollution as an act of minor future-making, the experience of living with pollution can inspire critical reflections on what politically relevant and empowering roles the most affected communities might play as acts of resistance (Rafael). Students then may also engage in historicising the contamination and its unequal spatial effect and exposure of marginalised communities, possibly elaborating maps that visualise the spatial–temporal distribution of minor and major oil leaks. Additionally, students can reflect on how fishing communities develop expertise regarding contamination patterns and, even more reflectively, on how to relate and complement scientific knowledge with the traditional knowledge of these communities.

As a next step, each group of students is then invited to contribute a subpage to the riparianstruggles platform. This subpage should contain:

1. 1. The selected film fragment with a short reflection;

2. 2. The overarching topic and associated questions;

3. 3. A thematic image (photograph, map, drawing);

4. 4. A 500–1000-word text that gives a speculative or analytical response to the question(s), interweaving research and imagination.

Across these examples, overarching themes emerge. Temporalities, such as tides, reproductive cycles and climate-induced disruptions, interact with spatialities: territories of contamination, state-imposed conservation zones, or traditional fishing areas. The fragmented, multi-scalar, and relational nature of mangrove life becomes visible through the pedagogical process. These forms of engagement not only situate students and the wider public with an interest in social ecologies, public health and the like within emergent fields of political ecology but also encourage active participation in the creation of shared, situated knowledge.