Desirée Poets

Virginia Tech | VT · Department of Political Science

Since at least the 1980s, policy, research, and common-sense depictions have associated Rio de Janeiro’s favelas with problems of gang violence, governance vacuum (state absence), and crisis. Within this discourse, favelas are constructed as spaces of exception, whose racialized residents are stripped of legal status and marked by a politics of dea...

This article argues that settler colonialism structures Indigenous rights in Brazil and shows how Indigenous peoples have also engaged Indigenous rights to interrupt settler colonialism. To this end, it turns to the 20th century (re-)emergence of officially "extinct" Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Northeast Region and the central role of the toré r...

Scholars and officials have argued that the strengthening of communities and community-led development constitute an important policy goal in the fight against emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, most strategies to address such crises fail to consider the significance of community-driven solutions, community-level knowledge, an...

This book is available for free e-book (PDF) download at: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/c2e58cb2-28f5-45ad-a1eb-c0035fe59da8 (with thanks to the TOME initiative). Unsettling Brazil is based on ethnographically-informed research with five urban Indigenous, favela, and quilombola (maroon) communities and movements (Aldeia Maracanã, Quilombo S...

How does settler colonialism’s logic of elimination work in Brazil? Starting with a brief history of miscegenation as assimilation/elimination, this article addresses this question through the experiences of one urban Indigenous group (Aldeia Maracanã) and one urban Afro-descendant quilombo (Sacopã) in Rio de Janeiro. Based on fieldwork conducted b...

This article explores how two community-led newspapers in Maré and Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, promoted social resilience in their respective favelas during the first 6 months of COVID-19. We reviewed stories published in both newspapers and interviewed a sample of their journalists to investigate the newspapers’ responses to the pandemic’s...

This article introduces a special issue of Community Change focused on Decolonization/Decoloniality and Entangled Ontologies. The guest editors provide a summary of each article and context for the pieces’ development from a PhD seminar at Virginia Tech in Fall 2022 titled “Decolonization/Decoloniality/Entangled Ontologies.”

Brazil's favela residents have long challenged the dominant media and social narrative that has, for decades, described them via discourses of criminality. This article examines the work of Redes da Maré, a civil society organization that offers cultural spaces and services for community-based creation and diffusion of the arts in its namesake fave...

This article is a response to Paul Kelly's discussion of Lenin and Mao in Conflict, War and Revolution: The problem of politics in international political thought (2022). Taking on a postcolonial perspective, it analytically expands how the book theorizes violence by understanding the violence of capitalist and colonial domination as a paradigm of...

O Complexo da Maré, localizado na Zona Norte do Rio de Janeiro e com cerca de 140 mil moradores, é o maior aglomerado de favelas do Brasil. Como este livro demonstra, as 16 comunidades que compõem a Maré são vibrantes e diversas, apesar de serem frequentemente representadas de maneira pejorativa. Maré de Dentro: Arte, Cultura e Política no Rio de J...

Introducing "Indigenous Urbanisation in Latin America" Special Issue

Complexo da Maré is a group of 16 contiguous favelas and housing projects in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro. Home to an estimated 140,000 individuals, Maré is Brazil's largest agglomeration of favelas. Often depicted in a negative light, these favelas are in fact vibrant and diverse communities, as revealed in this remarkable book. Maré from t...

See here: https://connect.apsanet.org/s34/newsletters/ Contributions argue for the centrality of race, indigeneity & Empire to International Relations scholarship from different perspectives and locations. I turn to the example of policing and international conflict, then take on Robbie Shilliam's (2020) point about 'inheritance' to take stock of...

This is a short (c. 1000-word) working paper that places the US and Brazil in conversation in light of the current Black Lives Matter protests.

Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, quilombo communities have the right to the titles of the lands they occupy. This paper assesses quilombo titles' transformative potential through the experiences of Rio de Janeiro's urban quilombo Sacopã, an ethnic Afro-descendant community once perceived as a favela. Unlike its neighbours, the community managed to...

The Pacification Police Units - UPPs - implemented in Rio de Janeiro since 2008 have as one of their stated goals the promotion of the integration between the pacified favelas and the 'formal' city, aiming to overcome the view of Rio as a 'divided city'. Intending to problematize the reasoning behind this stated goal in order to question the UPPs'...