Gabriel Arruda

Gabriel Gabriel Arruda is a PhD candidate and holds a Master’s degree in Music from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). He is currently undertaking a sandwich doctoral programme at the University of Aveiro. He has been a member of the Ethnomusicology Studies Group (GrEt) at the UFMG School of Music since 2021; of TeiA – Territories, Integral Education and Citizenship Research Group, based at the UFMG Faculty of Education, since 2025; of the Mestre Conga Samba Collective, a municipal association of instrumentalists, singers, composers, and researchers dedicated to samba culture in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, since 2020; and of the social project Bloco do Bigode, also since 2020.

He was also a member of the República Project: Research, Documentation and Memory Group, affiliated with the Department of History of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy at UFMG (2022–2025).

Among the research and outreach projects in which he has participated are the Registration of Samba as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Belo Horizonte (2022–2025), which resulted in the dossier Horizontes do Samba and in the recognition of samba as municipal cultural heritage; the co-coordination of the project Mapping and Exhibition of Inspiring Experiences in Integral Education (since 2025), developed in partnership between the Ministry of Education and the Faculty of Education of UFMG; research conducted in collaboration with the Rio Memórias Association and the República Project (2023); artistic training courses delivered to the group CARDE | Art, Design and Museum (2024); and his activity as a cavaquinho instructor within the project Cavaquinho no Bigode (2023–2025).

He has been a public employee at the Federal University of Minas Gerais since 2017. As a musician, performing on cavaquinho and guitar, he is a member of the groups Na Cadência do Samba and Bloco do Bigode, participating in concerts, recordings, and Carnival parades.

Doctoral project

Title
Práticas contra-hegemônicas no samba em Belo Horizonte

Advisor
Eduardo Rosse (Brasil/UFMG), Susana Sardo

Abstract
The doctoral research project presented here proposes an ethnography of socio-musical contexts linked to “samba culture” in Belo Horizonte. It aims to conduct an intensive, applied study of a locally situated web of social interactions involving individuals and groups closely connected to the creation and maintenance of a space dedicated to samba in the city: the Opção bar, in the Caiçara neighborhood. Through the description and analysis of the actions and lived experiences of people and groups embedded in this setting, the study seeks to understand the meanings and social significance of the sounds and forms of knowledge mobilized in the practice of samba, in their political, philosophical, economic, geographic, musical, choreological, and sociocultural dimensions of confronting violence, neglect, prejudice, exclusion, intractable social injustices, and the lack of recognition of alterity. By examining samba practices in light of their potential to contest fixed, segregationist, and oppressive models of culture, the research intends to better grasp which contemporary (or updated) mechanisms of oppression sustain such models in the realities under study, how these mechanisms operate, and what alternative modes of existence are being articulated.

Keywords
Samba; Sambista; Black diaspora; shared research practices; ethnomusicology.