Dispatches from the Global South: From Rescue Kitten to Research Assistant
I came to Belém, Pará with a research agenda. I ended up adopting a cat and gaining a research assistant.
The cat entered the project through Jonathan, one of my good hearted graduate students and guides to life in Belém. He found a tiny kitten in need of help and rescued him before the streets, the heat, or simple bad luck could decide his future. Jonathan brought the kitten to me, and what began as a temporary act of care quickly became a permanent appointment.
The kitten was small, hungry, curious, and entirely unqualified for academic work. Naturally, I hired him.
I named him Hank—formally, Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegato*—and he soon took up his duties as research assistant, editorial supervisor, and director of field operations. He contributed very little to the literature review, but he showed exceptional skill in walking across keyboards, interrupting interviews, inspecting grocery bags, and reminding me that no research project survives long without food, shelter, trust, and companionship.
I came to Belém to study innovation, artificial intelligence, and the Global South. Jonathan’s rescue of one small kitten gave the project an unexpected guide—and gave these dispatches their navigator.
*Henry the Navegato?
Brazilians love a good pun "Navegador" means navigator (or in modern Portuguese web browser) , and gato is cat. Put them together and we've got Navegato. Henry the Navigator was a Portuguese prince in the 1400s who, oddly, barely sailed anywhere himself. What he did was set up a kind of school on the southern tip of Portugal — mapmakers, shipbuilders, and sailors all in one place — and fund the voyages that launched Europe's Age of Discovery. Those voyages went on to "discover," and then conquer, much of the world Portugal would later colonize, Brazil included.
And yet Prince Henry never left land - he collected data, much like how an LLM is constructed today. Every Portuguese ship that limped home in those years brought logs, coastlines, wind patterns, and corrections, and Henry folded all of it back into one master map or Padrão Real (Royal Register) — retrained, over and over, on the data the fleet brought back. Each voyage was a training run. The map was the weights. The sailors who set out the next season were running inference on everything the fleet had learned before them. An LLM built out of caravels and parchment.
I want to be careful here. To love the idea of navigation is not to romanticize what came with it. The Age of Discovery carried a horrible human toll — enslavement, conquest, cultures broken open at the point of a sail. That history is real and I won't launder it. Naming a cat after a navigator is not a monument to any of that.
It's a repurposing. Because my navigator — the small one asleep on my field notes — is retraining on gentler data. He hunts for three things only: communication, commerce, and culture. Not territory. Not extraction. The exact three C's the Fulbright mission is built on. Hank leads a twelve-stop expedition through Belém — Ver-o-Peso at dawn, the cacao kitchens of Ilha do Combu, the Theatro da Paz, the Basílica de Nazaré — and at every stop he asks the only questions worth asking of a place: What do you observe? What did you hear in Portuguese? Why does this matter?
That's the quiet argument underneath the Fulbright AI Initiative work I'm doing here. The old navigator compressed the world in order to cross it. The new ones — the curious kind, the kind a twelve-year-old and a Fulbright scholar can both become — compress it in order to understand it.
More dispatches from the Global South to come.
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