Junior Fellows

Alain El Youssef holds a bachelor’s degree in history from USP (2007), as well as a master’s degree (2011), PhD (2019), and a postdoctoral degree (2023) in social history from the same institution. He has experience in the field of history, with an emphasis on politics, diplomacy, slave trade, slavery, and abolition in the Empire of Brazil. He is a member of the Laboratory for Studies on Brazil and the World System (Lab-Mundi/USP) and coordinator of the research group “Capital, State, and Labor: The Crisis of Black Slavery in the Long 19th Century”. He is the author of Press and Slavery: Politics and the Slave Trade in the Empire of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1822-1850) (Intermeios, 2016). He is currently working on a book project aimed at analysing the Brazilian abolitionist process from a global perspective.

Project: Fighting Against Inequality: The Abolition of Brazilian Slavery in Global Perspective, 1879-1888

Abstract:

The project aims to analyse the integration of the Empire of Brazil into the definitive crisis of Black slavery in the Americas. This goal is pursued through two distinct but related plans. The first consists of examining how Brazilian historical agents guided their expectations about the future of captivity based on the emancipation experiences of Cuba and the United States, their interpretations of the American Reconstruction period, and the pressure they received from North Atlantic abolitionism. The second involves verifying how, in the last quarter of the 19th century, Cuba’s wars of independence, changes in the international capitalist system, and the transformation in the nature of national states impacted certain historical processes underway in the Empire. By integrating these two dimensions, the research intends to understand how global political, economic, and social events and phenomena contributed to creating the field of possibilities that sealed the fate of Brazilian slavery.

Main discipline: History

After completing her undergraduate studies at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Julia von Sigsfeld pursued a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. She completed a PhD in the field of sociology of knowledge, awarded by the Institute of Latin American Studies of the FU Berlin in 2020, as a fellow of the International Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms”. Ensuing two and a half years as a research assistant of the director of the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Julia von Sigsfeld is currently the restitution coordinator at the Ethnologisches Museum / Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz).

Project: Restitution and Curating Conviviality

Abstract:
Ethnological museums have been struggling to find appropriate responses to a process of postcolonial reckoning. At the same time, the return of “diasporic” artefacts or entities, stirs up the question of how restitutions can contribute to unravelling the museum given its rootedness in colonial modernity. So, what modes of relation can/ do restitutions evoke? How can the museum become a sphere of possibility of encounters with epistemological and ontological frameworks that have been rendered invalid? This research will delve into the possibilities of curating conviviality in these terms and pose questions about the curatorial effects of restitution in terms of human/ more-than-human conviviality-inequality.

Main discipline: Sociology

Dr. Xavier do Monte’s research activities focus on the dynamics of (in)security using gender and race as categories of analysis. They articulate the link between macro security policies and everyday experiences through the use of sociological tools. She has a doctorate in sociology from Université de Paris 8, a master’s degree in gender studies from Paris’ EHESS, as well as an international relations degree from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). She has taught at Université de Lille, Université de Paris 8, and at UnB. She has worked as a consultant for Frameworks Institute, the OCDE, and as a program assistant in Brasília with UNDP and UN Women.

Project: Militarised coexistence, inequality and women’s resistance in Brazil

The militarization of the war on drugs has particular effects on Brazilian women, especially those on the periphery, by increasing their vulnerability through economic exploitation, exclusion from institutional policy processes and access to fundamental rights. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in the number of women’s activist collectives against police violence and growing mobilization. How can this phenomenon be explained when it seems that the political, economic and security environment has been designed to silence them? Despite growing militarization, understood here as a gendered policy of unequal distribution of precariousness (Butler, 2010), how have these women’s groups been able to organize and demonstrate resilience and anti-militarist resistance? Drawing on Cynthia Enloe’s concept of militarization as a gendered process and applying it to the Brazilian case, Izadora Xavier’s research proposes to look at Brazilian women’s resistances through their capacity to reappropriate and subvert the dominant security narrative.

Main discipline: Sociology

Krista Lillemets earned her PhD in Sociology from the FU Berlin in 2023. Her research interests include (global) historical sociology, Marxist political economy of labour, world-systems analysis, global labour history, unfree and compulsory labour arrangements in historical and contemporary capitalism, geopolitics of knowledge with a focus on Latin America and Brazil. She has published on global social inequalities and political economy of social policy. She has been a visiting lecturer at Tallinn University (2008-2009) and a visiting researcher at USP (2014). Her doctoral thesis Working-Class at Large in Historical Capitalism: Global Southern Perspectives (2022) examines critically the hegemonic concepts of labour and working-class in social sciences from the viewpoint of peripheral knowledge production, and colonial/ post-colonial forms of unfree and compulsory forms of labour. At the moment she prepares a book proposal based on her doctoral thesis.

Project: Coexisting Labour Configurations in Brazil’s “New Historiography”: A Peripheral Approach to Macro-Micro Entanglements

The project examines the mix of enslaved, compulsory and free labour in 19th-century Brazil under the hegemony of liberal-industrial capitalism. The underlying premise of this project is that the definition of capitalism as a socio-economic system of “free” wage labour presents limitations in taking into account more complex colonial and peripheral labour arrangements in capitalist development, particularly the coerced (unfree) and unwaged/ semi-waged labour. Hence, the aim is to renovate the dominant concept from the viewpoint of peripheral realities and knowledge production. By contesting the evolutionary argument about the transition from unfree to “free” wage labour, the project expands the research on Brazil’s “new historiography” developed within the ambit of Dr Lillemets’ doctoral dissertation, which demonstrated how colonial slavery regimes developed in the 19th century into complex mixes of enslaved, compulsory, and free (non-slave) labour nationally, regionally, and in different units of production. By combining the research on micro-histories of labour and the macro-structural studies on capitalist slavery, the project examines the coexisting forms of labour exploitation, crossed by social, racial, and legal hierarchies, and structured by the transformations in the world-economy under liberal-industrial capitalism.

Main discipline: Sociology