Vera Sales is a PhD candidate and part of the ANIMAPOLIS Research Group within the Department of Human Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her project conceptualises animals and infrastructures as political subjects within discussions of urban inequalities in urban studies.

She is particularly interested in intersectional scholarship engaging in critical infrastructure, care studies, and animal studies. Through her engagement with questions of race, class, and gender, her work aims to challenge mainstream understandings of more-than-human relationships and highlight their tensions.

In her research project, "Humans, Rats, and Infrastructures: A More-Than-Human Approach to Health Inequalities in Rio de Janeiro," she investigates how multispecies relationships shape urban inequality in Brazil. By examining the unrecognised, mundane activities involved in sustaining these relationships, she demonstrates how such efforts demand resource-intensive labor. A burden frequently displaced onto populations already marginalized along lines of race, class, and gender.

BA 

Cities and Changes [Interdisciplinary Social Sciences]

MA

Contemporary Urban Transformations [Research Master Urban Studies]

Research Training and Fieldwork Preparation [Master International Development Studies]

Diversity & Inclusion Committee [Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies – GPIO]