Dr Andreza A. De Souza Santos
In September 2018, I joined the Latin American Centre as the Departmental Lecturer and a fellow at St. Antony’s college. I share with my colleagues in LAC the enthusiasm for interdisciplinary research to understand the social, political and economic challenges in Latin American cities. I also look at Latin America comparatively, and apply knowledge gathered while living and studying in places like South Africa and India.
In the LAC, I lecture the courses ‘Cities and Citizenship in Latin America’, discussing mega-cities, informal housing, and social movements; and the course ‘Politics in Brazil’, focussing on Brazil’s contemporary politics. I also contribute to the course 'Political Economy in Latin America', which I taught in 2019, and to the Research Methods courses. As the Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme for the next four years, I have the opportunity to organise seminars and host visiting scholars and students working on a variety of disciplines discussing Brazilian inequalities and democracy.
As a political anthropologist, my research is mainly concerned with the intersections and the dynamics between formal and informal political and economic systems. In my ethnography in Ouro Preto, Brazil, I have observed participatory politics (Policy Councils): who participates in meetings, how do meetings develop, and which impact do participatory politics have in the city? What I have seen is that participating is not the same as voicing concerns, and people may go to meetings but remain silent. Sub-optimal decisions in policy councils are sometimes less costly for participants than confronting established powers in town. Thus, there is a negative relationship between participation and levels of economic dependency. Whereas grassroots politics is a valuable resource to press for urban amenities, it is important to consider which spaces are adequate for effective participation and when poverty mobilizes or discourages participatory politics.
Looking more specifically at heritage policy-making, grassroots activism is vital because city spaces are preserved, presumably with the input of civil society – representing their memories and uses of spaces. My monograph: “The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil” (2019), looks at the challenges of citizens’ political participation. I have also co-edited two books about comparative urbanism, mainly looking at Brazil, South Africa, India and China (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). I have other papers published by Contemporary Social Science, Ethnography, and JLAG.
Before coming to the LAC, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Anthropology in Oxford, where I am still involved teaching on urban ethnographic methods. I completed my DPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, a Masters in Social Sciences at the University of Freiburg, University of KwaZulu Natal and Jawaharlal Nehru University; and Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science at the University of Brasilia. I also worked at the Ministry of Social Development, helping to establish the Zero Hunger Programme and Family Grant Programme, and at the Indian Embassy to Brazil, setting up collaborations between these two countries. At the United Nations, I worked on reports on transnational organised crime and violence against women and girls.
