Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 7 PM

Please join us for this free and open event. Everyone is welcome, not just CFWAC members.

Mount Vernon Canyon Club at 24933 Club House Drive, Golden, CO

Kurt Shaw

Polarization and Encounter in contemporary Brazilian Politics

Long known for an ethic of hospitality and the virtue of the “cordial man,” Brazil has come to rival the United States for the fury and animus of its political polarization. How has Brazilian public opinion — so hopeful and unified only a decade and a half ago, turned to the rage and division one sees in a variety of political movements?

The conversation on polarization concludes with the seeds of hope, showing how afro-Brazilian and indigenous ideas of conflict as productive can offer a pathway to dialogue, and how traditions of making art together — in carnaval, in samba, music, and sport — may provide new opportunities for overcoming polarization.

Kurt Shaw studied philosophy at Williams and classics at Harvard, but his real education came from two years in Central American refugee camps and Colombian slums, where he found poor and marginalized people more compelling thinkers than many academic philosophers.

He developed the world’s largest network of grass-roots organizations serving street kids, work that contributed to the dramatic reduction in the number of children living on the streets of Latin American cities. Seeing the power of collaborative film-making with children, Shaw and co-director Rita da Silva directed the first feature film made entirely by ex-child soldiers, produced an indigenous telenovela in Bolivia, and directed the first fictional film in the Amazonian Tukano language. Their The Princess in the Alleyway, won best film of 2017 by the Subversive Cinema Society and their 2019 documentary The Other Side of the Other spent two years on rotation on Brazilian public TV.

Shaw has published many academic and journalistic articles, two novels, and seven academic books on topics ranging from political philosophy to Amazonian epidemiology, as well as producing hip-hop and pop albums. He has won a Fulbright, the Harvard First Decade Award, The Freedom to Create Prize, and the United Nations Intercultural Innovation Award. In 2022, he was awarded an Academic Visitorship at Oxford University. Over the last decade, his research has examined the roots of Brazilian political polarization in the history of Portuguese colonization, slavery, and Brazil’s complicated relationship with race, wealth, and culture, based on hundreds of interviews and dozens of films with Brazilians from all walks of life.