The impact of criminalisation on women and feminist activist groups in Brazil

Seed Funding: UK-Brazil Knowledge Frontiers Symposium

The proposed collaboration aims to examine the social effects of Brazil’s current social, political, economic and ecological crisis on activists, focusing on the criminalisation of feminist activists and movements. We seek to analyse how insecurity, economic and political shifts have affected the work of activists.
 
Since 2007, with the pan American games in Brazil, followed by 2014 World Cup and 2016´s Olympic games, several restrictive laws regarding social movements and public gatherings have been passed in Brazil. Additionally, under the government of president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has experienced an escalation of practices that promote extractive capitalism at the expense of social equality.

Such forms of exploitation provoke resistance from activist communities in some of the world’s most unequal cities. This proposal extends our research with activist communities in Brazil by developing a wider investigation of what is happening to activist women in a new context of authoritarian governance. 


We propose to develop new knowledge about emergent forms of authority and resistance that seek to foreground perspectives on the contestation of space and governance.