Justice Futures: Living a feminist life? Women’s activism as resistance against authoritarian governance in Latin America.
In October 2025, mothers in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas searched for the bodies of their sons following the deadliest police inflicted massacre on record in the city. At the time of writing at least 121 people were killed in a single police operation. This paper examines the lived experiences of feminist, Black, and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders in Brazil as they navigate routine violence and shrinking democratic space. Grounded in ethnographic testimonies from feminist and women activists in Brazil, the research situates their experiences within the broader framework of intersectional and black feminism.
SCCJR / SocSci Hub
Date: Tuesday 24 March 2026
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: Online
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, University of Bristol and Laurie Denyer Willis, University of Edinburgh.
In October 2025, mothers in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas searched for the bodies of their sons following the deadliest police inflicted massacre on record in the city. At the time of writing at least 121 people were killed in a single police operation (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR 2025).
This paper examines the lived experiences of feminist, Black, and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders in Brazil as they navigate routine violence and shrinking democratic space. Grounded in ethnographic testimonies from feminist and women activists in Brazil, the research situates their experiences within the broader framework of intersectional and black feminism.
This is the second seminar in the SCCJR Justice Futures Series.
This talk builds on the participatory research of the Feminist Cities Colab, a British Academy funded project that sheds light on how everyday life in cities become shaped by security discourses, policing as state repression and feminist resistance.
Through narratives of survival under Bolsonaro’s far-right regime—and the disillusionment that followed the return of leftist governance—the paper discusses how state-corporate violence and neoliberal dispossession converge to racialise insecurity and inflict an emotional toll on activism at the frontlines. Simultaneously, from contested politics emerge alternative infrastructures of care, collective protection, and political education, that reimagine uses of urban space, reconfiguring the city as both a site of international harms and a terrain of insurgent solidarity.
Drawing from feminist testimonies and theory, we will share a short documentary produced by a collective of feminist activists and scholars to support our argument that transnational feminist rights defenders articulate a critical epistemology of resistance that challenge dominant security paradigms. Their reflections expose how authoritarian strategies—surveillance, militarised policing, and neoliberal governance—are lived and contested through gendered and racialised bodies. In doing so, they expand the political imagination of what safety, justice, and democracy can mean in contexts of enduring colonial and patriarchal violence. Ultimately, these stories show how imagining feminist cities is part of a broader lived praxis of survival and resistance that challenge a global architecture of dispossession and authoritarianism.
Biographies:
Dr Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti is a critical social scientist whose research interests lie at the intersections of decolonial theory, feminist activism and carcerality. Her work theorises violence, the criminalisation of activism, migration and feminism. She is based at the University of Bristol and is the author of 'A Southern Criminology of Violence, Youth and Policing' (Routledge, 2020), co-editor for the 'Southern Perspectives on Policing, Security and Social Order' (Bristol University Press, 2023), co-editor of the second edition of ‘The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South’, co-founder and co-director of The Feminist Cities Colab. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3885-8603
Dr Laurie Denyer Willis is an anthropologist and feminist urban theorist whose work examines the intersections of cities, labour, gender, and political power. She holds a degree in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT and is Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology. Her scholarship brings together urban anthropology, feminist theory, and political economy to understand how contemporary cities are shaped by right-wing populism and shifting regimes of work, care, and governance. She is the author of the award-winning book Go with God (University of California Press), which investigates the entanglements of religion, politics, and urban life. Across her broader body of work, Laurie centres women’s labour - both paid and unpaid - and advances a feminist framework that treats care, embodiment, and collective wellbeing as core urban concerns rather than private ones. Her attention to health and wellness operates as a feminist analytic: a way of thinking about exhaustion, healing, and survival under neoliberal urban conditions.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2630-9092
The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research Justice Futures Seminar is brand new series for 2026.
This monthly series will engage with a range of concerns and questions relating to new and evolving social harms, how social systems and institutions can contribute to, or alleviate, harms and injustices and how justice futures might be re-enacted or reimagined.
You are all welcome to join us for these informal online lunchtime sessions. You can see a full list in the table below.
For a full list of our upcoming seminars please see table below. Join our mailing list or follow us on BlueSky, TikTok and LinkedIn @TheSCCJR for updates on future events and news from the Centre.