OUR TEAM

Gaia Giuliani

Researcher

Researcher at the Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES), University of Coimbra, where she is the PI of (De)Othering.

PhD in History of political ideas (Torino, 2005). Associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017) and co-founder of InteRGRace – Interdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms.
She is an Italian Critical Whiteness Studies Pioneer, an Anti-racist Feminist Activist and Scholar, and a Transnational De-constructor of Post-colonial (visual) Archives of Monstrosity.

Among her publications: the monographs Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall’11 settembre ai giorni nostri (Le Monnier 2016), the co-authored Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani with dr. Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier 2013) `{`First prize 2014 in the 20th-21st century category by the American Association for Italian Studies`}`, and the forthcoming single-authored Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique, Routledge: London, 2020.

Sílvia Roque

Researcher

Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies and co-PI of (De)Othering, where she leads the French case and integrates the team of the Portuguese case study. She received her PhD in International Relations - International Politics and Conflict Resolution from the University of Coimbra. Since 2017 she has also been an invited professor at the MA program in African Studies, ISCTE-IUL.

In the last fifteen years she has worked on numerous research projects in the field of IR, particularly Peace Studies. In addition to Guinea-Bissau and El Salvador, where she has concentrated most of her research, she has also participated in research in Portugal and Mozambique. Moreover, she has collaborated with civil society organizations and international organizations in conducting studies and training that seeks to understand and reduce multiple violence expressions. Currently, she is working on intergenerational memory of the liberation struggles in Guinea-Bissau and on experiences and representations of female participation in political violence.

Ana Cristina Pereira

Researcher

Researcher at the Center for Social Studies/University of Coimbra and member of (De)Othering, where she integrates the team of the Portuguese case study.
Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, from the University of Minho, with the thesis Otherness and identity in film fiction in Portugal and Mozambique. Her main research interests are racism, social identity, social representations and cultural memory in cinema, from a post-colonial and intersectional perspective. On these topics, she has published work in national and international journals and books. She was a researcher at the project On the margins of Portuguese cinema: a study on Afro-descendant cinema produced in Portugal. She is an integrated researcher at CECS/UM and, at the present time, a member of the project Memories, cultures and identities: how the past weights on the present-day intercultural relations in Mozambique and Portugal?. As a SOPCOM associated, she is the coordinator of the Visual Culture WG and Vista journal. She is a member of NARP - Antiracist Nucleus of Porto.

Rita Santos

Researcher

Junior researcher at Center for Social Studies/University of Coimbra and member of (De)Othering, where she leads the UK case and integrates the team of the Portuguese case study. She is a PhD candidate in ``International Politics and Conflict Resolution``, School of Economics, University of Coimbra.

Over the last twelve years she has participated in several research projects in the fields of Peace and Security Studies. She was the co-coordinator and co-editor of the on-line bulletin P@x (2008-2014), the quarterly publication of the Peace Studies Working Group (NHUMEP/CES) and the executive coordinator of Observatory on Gender and Armed Violence/CES (2010-2014).

Her current research interests include: Feminism and IR/Security Studies; racialized and gendered tropes in the media and political representation of migrants, refugees and ``internal others”; violence, gender and small arms; and the agenda Women, Peace and Security. She is a member of the international networks International Action on Small Arms (IANSA) and the Global Alliance on Armed Violence.

Sofia José Santos

Researcher

Researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, where she coordinates the DeCodeM project as a Principal Investigator. She is a member of (De)Othering, where she integrates the team of the Portuguese case study. Since 2008 she has developed research on media and global interventionism; media and securitization processes; media and foreign policy; internet and technopolitics; and media and masculinities. She holds a PhD in International Politics and Conflict Resolution by the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a Diploma in Advanced Studies in Communication Sciences from ISCTE-IUL. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (2016-2019), postdoctoral researcher at OBSERVARE / UAL (2015/2016) and CES (2015), and researcher and coordinator of media and communication in Promundo-Europa (2014-2015). She was a visiting scholar at the Flemish Peace Institute and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universiteit Utrecht. She co-coordinated and co-edited the P@x Bulletin (NHUMEP/CES), was involved in numerous international networks, social movements, and undertook research and policy work for international think tanks and development agencies, such as NOREF, UKAID, Palladium, and Promundo-US.

Júlia Garraio

Researcher

Researcher at the Center for Social Studies/University of Coimbra and member of (De)Othering, where she leads the German case and integrates the team of the Portuguese case study. Violence, memory, identity, discourse and representation are key concepts in her work. Most of her research, activities and publications were dedicated to the German literature and culture in the twentieth century. In her PhD dissertation she examined the work of the German poet Günter Eich (1907-1972). Her post-doctoral research project focused the cultural memories of the rape of German women and girls in the context of WWII. Her recent work examines how women's experiences in wartime are appropriated and transformed by gendered national scripts. Her current research interests include sexual violence, masculinities, feminisms, memory, nationalism, populism, comparative literature and media. She is co-founder and member of the international research group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (http://warandgender.net/about/).
Media representations of refugees, migrantes, and internal “Others” through a mixed intersectional approach joining critical whiteness studies, security studies postcolonial studies, media, cultural and gender studies.

CONSULTANTS

Cristina Demaria

Consultant

Cristina Demaria is Associate Professor in Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies of the University of Bologna. She teaches on semiotics of conflict and post-conflict cultures, memory studies, semiotics of media, visual studies and gender theories. Her main fields of interests are gender, violence and memory, media representations of wars and conflict, trauma theories. Her publications include: Memory and translations across cultures and disciplines (edited with. B. Brodski, Translation. An interdisciplinary Journal, 2017); Il trauma, l'archivio, il testimone (Bologna, BUP, 2012); The Genres of Post-conflict Testimonies(with. M Daly, London and Nottingham, CPPP Press, 2008).

Dubravka Žarkov

Consultant

Dubravka Žarkov is Associate Professor in Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam.She teaches on feminist epistemology, conflict theories, and media and war. Her main fields of interest are gender, sexuality and ethnicity/national identity in the context of war and violence, with focus on sexual violence and its media representations. Her publications include: Conflict, Peace, Security and Development: Theories and Methodologies.London and New York: Routledge (2015; with H.M. Hintjens); Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom. Former Yugoslavia and Beyond. New York USA: Springer (2014; with M. Glasius); Gender, Conflict, Development: Challenges of Practice.New Delhi: Zubaan (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia.Durham and London: Duke University Press (2007).

Inês Amaral

Consultant

Inês Amaral is Associate Professor at Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, and a researcher at Communication and Society Research Centre of University of Minho. She teaches on cyberculture, digital media, and media representations. Her main fields of interest are audiences, digital inclusion and active ageing, participation and social media, media and digital literacy, gender and media. Her publications include: Policies for gender equality in Portugal: contributions to a framework for older women. Revista Prisma Social (22) (2018, with F. Daniel and S. Guadalupe); Bridging the gap between micro and macro forms of engagement: Three emerging trends in research on audience participation - chapter in The future of audiences. A foresight analysis of interfaces and engagement. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2018, with M. F. Murru; M. J. Brites and G. Seddighi); Social Representations of Active Ageing in a Gendered Look. Análise Psicológica (34)4 (2016, with F. Daniel, R. Monteiro and E. Caetano); Social Networks: emerging sociabilities. Covilhã: LabCom.IFP (2016).

Joana Gorjão Henriques

Consultant

Joana Gorjão Henriques is a Portuguese journalist who works for the newspaper Público. She has reported extensively on human rights, racism, legacies from colonialism and politics of memory. She authored the series Racismo em Português and Racismo à Portuguesa. She was awarded several prizes, such as Prémio AMI - Jornalismo contra a Indiferença and Prémio Gazeta de Imprensa 2017.

Lene Hansen

Consultant

Lene Hansen is the Project Director of Images and International Security and a Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. Lene’s interest in images and international security grows out of her earlier work on discourses and the politics of representation, see Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War(Routledge, 2006). The 2005-6 Muhammad Cartoon Crisis led her to focus on the role images play in world politics, see 'Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis' (European Journal of International Relations, 2011). Lene’s contribution to Images and International Security intersects more broadly with her work on gender, cyber security, securitization theory, and the history and sociology of International Security Studies, see also The Evolution of International Security Studies, co-authored with Barry Buzan (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lene is a 2011 recipient of The Elite Research Prize of The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Martina Tazzioli

Consultant

Martina Tazzioli is a Lecturer in Political Geography at Swansea University. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015), co-author with Glenda Garelli of Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration (2016), and co-editor of Foucault and the History of Our Present (2015) and Foucault and the Making of Subjects (2016). She is co-founder of the journal Materialifoucaultiani and part of the editorial board of Radical Philosophy Journal.

Monish Bhatia

Consultant

Monish Bhatia is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Birkbeck, University of London. He teaches in the areas of race, migration, border controls, and critical criminology. In 2017, Monish completed a self-funded project on the aftermath of deportation and capturing narratives of those who are/were subjected to forced removals from the UK. Previously, he has done a Carnegie Trust funded project on destitution and drug use amongst asylum seekers, and his Doctoral Thesis focused on the impact of policies and procedures on asylum seekers and 'illegal' migrants in the UK. His publications include: “Researching ‘Bogus’ Asylum Seekers, ‘Illegal’ Migrants and ‘Crimmigrants’”, in Lumsden, K and Winter, A (eds), Reflexivity in Criminological Research, Palgrave: London (2014); “Turning Asylum Seekers into ‘Dangerous Criminals’: Experiences of the Criminal Justice System of Those Seeking Sanctuary” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4(3): 97‐111 (2015); Media, Crime and Racism Palgrave: London (2018, with S. Poynting and W. Tufail). Monish is currently writing a monograph titled Border Harms: Treatment of Asylum Seekers and Illegalised Migrants in Great Britain, to be published by Palgrave (paperback) in 2019/2020. Monish can be followed on Twitter: @DrMonishBhatia.

Olga Solovova

Consultant

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RESEARCH FELLOWS

Maria Elena Indelicato

Visiting Fellow

Maria Elena Indelicato (she, her, hers) is a 2019 FCT Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2014 at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, where she also collaborated with Victoria Grieves on the Australian Research Council (ARC) 'More than family history: race, gender and the Aboriginal family in Australian history'. From 2015 to 2018, she lectured at the School of Communication, Ningbo Institute of Technology (NIT), Zhejiang University, where she also acted as international vice-director of the Huallywood Film Research Center. In 2018, she was awarded with the Endeavour Research Fellowship to conduct the project 'Natives, Settlers, and Migrants: a Historical Study of Social Relations in Australia.' Besides her monograph ‘Australian New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border,’ Indelicato, has published in feminist, race and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies e-Journal, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Paedagogica Historica, Transnational Cinemas, Feminist Review, and Postcolonial Studies besides several chapters on edited books on settler colonialism, cinema, and international education.

Nicola Cosentino

Visiting Fellow

University of Calabria (2018-2019)

Cassie Washington

Visiting Fellow

NYU (2018)

Fernanda Belizario

Visiting Fellow

Researcher, Advocacy and Policy Officer at Agência Piaget para o Desenvolvimento/Research Education and Community Intervention Research Center (RECI). She holds a Ph.D. in Post-colonialism and Global Citizenship from Centre for Social Studies of University of Coimbra. Her dissertation presents a postcolonial critique of the immigration routes of Brazilian dissident transgender identities (Travestis) to the sex work industry in southern Europe. Until 2019, she was the implementing coordinator of the European Commission funded project TransR (Trans Sex Workers’ Rights are Human Rights), which aimed at researching the status of trans sex workers’ rights in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria and Greece. She holds a MA in Consumption studies and BAs in both Social Sciences and Communications from University of São Paulo. She has 15+ experience in Brazilian public, private and non-profit sector as an activist, writer, project manager and teacher. Her current fields of interest are: asylum seekers in Europe; necropolitics; queer and transgender studies, postcolonial and decolonial theories, subaltern aesthetics, sex workers rights, transnational social movements and epistemologies of the south.

Carla Panico

Visiting Fellow

Carla Panico is a PhD candidate in Postcolonialism and Global Citizenship at CES - Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra - and a FCT scholarship holder. She is a member of ITM - Inter-thematic Group on Migrations and she is part of the organizing and scientific committee of the “2020. Migrating Rights | Keywords” series. She holds a Master's Degree in Contemporary History from University of Pisa – Italy. Her research interests include migrations, nationalism, whiteness and new social movements in Southern Europe, i.e. in contemporary Italy.
She is currently a collaborator of the international research network Compoliticas for the project Cibermov - Cyberactivism, Digital Citizenship and New Urban Movements and a member of the “Societá italiana delle Storiche” – Italian Research Society of Women History.

Lúcia Arruda

Visiting Fellow

Lúcia Arruda is a PhD candidate in Human Rights in Contemporary Societies, since 2019, at CES/University of Coimbra, with the research project European border regime, Human Rights, and solidarity in three European countries Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Social and political activist, with a law degree, and a master’s in Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention at the University of Bologna 2002, between 2008/2016 she was the legal advisor of Bloco/Esquerda at the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores, in which, in 2016, held the position of Parliament member for Bloco Esquerda/Açores. Between 2004/2008, she was a legal adviser at the Regional Human Mobility Support Network, with the NGOs Kairós and ARRISCA in the development of social justice policies and Human Rights defense of refugees/migrants community, citizens returning compulsively from USA and Canada, ex-prisoners in social integration, and victims of gender violence. In 2003, she collaborated at the NGO Lake Worth for Global Justice, in the regularization of South American immigrants’ community, in Florida/USA. In 1997/99 collaborated in the legal advice of APAV- Portuguese Victim Support Association. In 2001, she conducted a project, “Understanding Human Rights and Citizenship, at the elementary schools in Matutine/Mozambique” with UNPOS/ Mozambique (United Nations Human Development Programme at Local Level) and the Department of Political Science at Bologna University. In 2001, external collaborator at the research project “Indigenous Identity``, in University of Bologna and Amilcar Cabral Center, in 2001 collaborated in the Professor Pier Cesare Bori intercultural project “Altra Via” developed at Dozza/Bologna penitentiary with Maghreb migrants. The main research areas of interest are the intersecting themes of migration/refugees, human rights, racism/ neocolonialism, solidarity, and social movements.

Laura Marquesan

Visiting Fellow

She graduated in International Relations (2018), with the thesis “A Latin American response to coloniality: the influence of parastatal agents in the construction of a plurinational agenda in Mexico and Bolivia”. Post-graduated in Latin American Social Studies at the University of Buenos Aires (2020), she is currently enrolled in a Master's Degree in Sociology at the University of Coimbra. Member of SESLA and co-founder of Slam das Minas Coimbra, the first collective of poetry spoken only by women in Portugal. Her research interests include counter-hegemonic movements, migrations, post-colonial and decolonial theory, theoretical dialogues between South-Political actors, and studies on race and gender.

Rossana Capobianco

Visiting Fellow

Rossana Capobianco (she/her) is a student of the Master in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Bologna and is doing a thesis internship at the Centro de Estudos Sociais in Coimbra. In 2019, she graduated in Philosophy at the University of Bologna. She also studied at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2018 and at the Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis University in 2020. She is interested in political philosophy, gender, postcolonial and cultural studies.

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Advisory board

Collaborations