Doctoral Researchers

Aline Correa holds a MA in sociology from the Universidade Federal Fluminense. She is a specialist in Southern epistemologies from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales and is a PhD candidate in Latin American regional studies at UzK. Her main interests revolve around racialisation, gender, and how they intersect with temporal conceptions in the context of national formation in Latin America. In her current project for Mecila, she focuses on sociology and history. By addressing the family as a convivial arrangement, her work assesses the process of instrumentalisation of the family in the transition to the republican period in Brazil. Focusing on the idealisation of the female role and the linking of offspring to the nation’s future, she seeks to highlight and discuss how temporal conceptions cut across racialised gender relations in the country.

Arturo Ríos is a historian, a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a doctoral candidate at COLMEX. He is a member of the international group “Atarraya: Historia Política y Social Iberoamericana”. His main areas of interest are the history and building of 19th century democratic regimes, electoral processes, petition-centered movements, circulation of information, and the overlaps between social history and the history of political languages. His current research project explores the growth of petitions as a phenomenon in 19th century Mexico, as well as the challenges that they posed for representative governments (some contemporary scholars regard petitions as a tool of true democracy). More specifically, his project investigates the relationship between public petitions (peticiones populares) and appeals to the people (apelaciones al pueblo), both of which are antecedents to contemporary forms of referendum, such as plebiscitos and consulta.

Camila de Oro is a graduate of the UNLP in literary studies and a CONICET doctoral scholarship recipient. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Sociocultural Studies (Europe and Latin America), a joint programme of the UNLP and the University of Rostock. Her first thesis project was on the publication Los Poetas, a volume of the series bibliotecas published by the editing house Editorial Claridad. Her current doctoral project focuses on the role of Editorial Claridad and Alejandro Korn in popularising German culture in Argentina. Her research interests in terms of theory and methodology are popular print literature, history of the book and of editing, and the history of ideas.

Clara Cuevas is a doctoral candidate in history at CEH, COLMEX and holds a graduate degree (mestrado) in history from the Federal University of Paraná. Her doctoral thesis project titled Un poco de sangre: la mercantilización de la sangre en México, 1940 a 1987 examines the political, social, and economic dimensions of the sale of blood in México, from the institutionalisation of blood banks to the HIV crisis. She is a former researcher of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project on technology and inequality “Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City”; a current member of the Ibero-American research network on sexuality Red-LIESS of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville; and a researcher in the working group History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Latin America of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She is an historian of the body and technology.

Claudio Cardinali holds an undergraduate degree in Geography from USP (2015) and another in Multilingual Communication, with a focus on translation in English, French, and German, from the Technische Hochschule Köln (2018), as well as an MA in Language and Literature – French/Portuguese from UzK (2020). He is currently a doctoral candidate associated with the Luso-Brazilian Institute of UzK and the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP.

Aesthetics and Dialectics in the Periphery: The Reception of Critical Theory in the Work of Roberto Schwarz
The aim of his research is to specify Brazilian essayist Roberto Schwarz’s understanding of literature, based on a comparison with authors who are part of the tradition associated with Schwarz, including Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The primary focus is the reception of these thinkers in Schwarz’s essays, with special reference to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Benjamin’s understanding of History. In the first stage, each individual perspective is drawn into a convergence. The aim is to establish the extent to which Schwarz is undeniably an heir to German Critical Theory. In the second stage, the work of the Brazilian critic is discussed from the perspective of his own argument. According to Schwarz, Brazil’s position on the periphery of capitalism enabled a writer like Machado de Assis to understand not only the fundamental social dynamics of the post-colonial period in the country, but also to point out ex negativo the distinctive features of the modes of being at the centre of the world system. The underlying idea here is that the ‘Brazilian version’ of Critical Theory, embodied in Schwarz’s essays, has specific traits that afford insights often more comprehensive than those of its ‘classic version’.

Juan holds a MA in Latin American literature from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) as well as a degree in Brazilian culture from the Universidad de San Andrés. He teaches Latin American literature at UNLP. He has received several scholarships and participated in exchanges, internships, and research projects in Brazil, Germany, Cuba, and Paraguay. He has received an honourable mention in the X International Prize “Dr Leopoldo Zea” for best graduate thesis in Latin America and Caribbean Studies (CIALC-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Currently, he serves as director of UNSAM’s journal Transas, Letras y Artes de América Latina and cultural manager of the Fabrica Cultural “En Eso Estamos” in La Plata.

Leila Giovana Izidoro is currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Human Rights at USP. She holds a graduate degree (mestrado) in the same area from the same institution. During her graduate studies, she completed a research internship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIS-UNAM). She is a member of the research group Human Rights, Centrality of Labour, and Marxism (DHCTEM-USP) and the Latin American Climate Lawyers Initiative for Mobilizing Action (LACLIMA). Her research agenda focuses on the labour struggles of waste-pickers in Latin America. At Mecila, she examines the impact of the process of financialisation of the environment in the construction of these workers’ legal subjectivity, based on a case study of the interactions that take place in the reverse logistics of recyclable packaging in Brazil, especially in the city of São Paulo.

Green Jobs and Legal Subjectivity: A Study Based on the Recycling Industry in Latin America
This research project aims to assess the extent to which the financialisation of the environment has shaped the “entrepreneurial” legal subjectivity of waste-pickers in Latin America. An assessment of waste-pickers’ work within the scope of the concept of “green jobs”, as defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), indicates the emergence of a new understanding of “employment”, one that embraces atypical hiring practices as a reflection of the workers’ free initiative. Based on Karl Marx’s labour theory of value and Evgeni Pachukanis’ critique of the legal form, this comparative case study examines the relations between waste-pickers, corporations, and the State with regard to the reverse logistics of recyclable packaging in Brazil and Mexico. In reverse logistics, waste-pickers are remunerated for the tonnage of waste collected, with offsetting increments according to the type of material, a co-operative credit fund, or provision of resources for operational improvements in their activities. Such a scenario of apparent coexistence in the sphere of circulation leaves aside the inequality in terms of production, whereby the exploitation of waste-pickers’ labour power occurs at the bottom of the recycling chain. The project identifies the constraints imposed by capital on the political power of these workers, steering them towards contracts and the enterprises’ sustainability.

Magdalena Tóffoli is a CONICET doctoral fellow at the IdIHCS and a PhD candidate in social sciences at the UNLP, where she previously earned an undergraduate degree (licenciatura) in sociology. Her main research interest is the processes of collective organisation in the sectores populares (working classes), especially among workers in the popular economy.

Subjectivity, engagement, and politics in an Argentine working-class organisation (2016-2021)
My doctoral research aims to contribute to the study of the political experiences of the popular economic sectors by analysing the forms of collective action, participation, and sociability that have developed around the organisation of workers in Argentina. I investigate the processes of social and political mobilisation focussing on the production of subjectivities that these processes enable. I use qualitative methods to analyse the organisation process in Greater La Plata’s popular economy from 2016 to 2020. This approach stresses the perspective of textile, rural, and community-care workers who participated in the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (Excluded Workers’ Movement), one of the representative organisations of the sector. I investigate the organisational practices, the meanings attached to participation, and the forms of sociability around the organisation to understand the particularities of this process in relation to the workers’ social and political trajectories.

Maurício Rodrigues Pinto is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at USP (PPGAS-USP). Both his undergraduate degrees in History (bacharel and licenciado) were obtained from the same university, as well as a specialisation in sociopsychology (Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, or FESPSP) and a graduate degree (mestrado) from the interdisciplinary programme Social Change and Political Participation (USP), with the thesis Pelo direito de torcer: das torcidas gays aos movimentos de torcedores contrários ao machismo e à homofobia no futebol. He is a researcher at the Núcleo de Estudos dos Marcadores Sociais da Diferença (Numas/USP), studying dynamics of gender, sexuality, and race in sports, especially in the context of Brazilian football. He also works as a teacher in formal and informal education.

Stories of Life, Stories of the Ball: Trans Football Players and Their Insurgencies on the Field
This research project explores and analyses the personal trajectories of trans football players. While football has attained the status of a national sport in Brazil, it has historically been characterised as belonging to the world of cisheteronormative men. Through ethnographic approaches to amateur indoor and outdoor football teams formed by trans men and transmasculine people, this study aims to show how trans people have taken ownership of the game and re-signified it. The pioneering team is Meninos Bons de Bola, created in August 2016. Today, there are more than 15 transmasculine amateur teams across the country, occupying public spaces traditionally associated with cisgender and supposedly heterosexual men. The main objective is to assess the meanings these teams attribute to the practice of football, and how the presence of transmasculine bodies on the playing fields challenges gender norms and expectations associated with the sport, especially those pertaining to masculinity. Furthermore, the project aims to determine how organising and belonging to exclusive and welcoming football teams may contribute to affirmation, both politically and in terms of identity. The research takes place in a context of political disputes over rights granted to the trans population, including in sports, in view of a number of proposals designed to restrict the participation of trans people in sporting events.

PhD candidate in law at USP, with a master of laws and a master in history degrees. His main fields of interest are legal and social history, and his studies mostly concern the complexities of urban live in Brazilian cities between the end of the 19th century and the 1920s. At Mecila, his project is to study the regulation of urban spaces through municipal legislation, and other normative expressions, comparing the cities of São Paulo, Curitiba, and Belém.