About
I am a PhD Candidate in political science at Northwestern University, with a primary emphasis on International Relations and a secondary emphasis on Political Theory. I was an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France for the 2019-2020 academic year. I have a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
With my current interdisciplinary research project, I want to contribute to ongoing debates on the shortcomings of current legal categories of protection for non-citizens by exploring to which extent they owe their potentialities and limits to notions of deservingness that sideline broader articulations of political responsibility. I take an ethnographic approach to the processes of construction of the categories of the stateless, refugee, trafficked human, temporary protected status (TPS), and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) through UN archival work and fieldwork with communities of rights claimants.
I have had amazing opportunities for professional development. I participated in the SSRC/NU Dissertation Development Program (Summer 2018); completed the Northwestern’s Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching Teaching Certificate (2018-2019); participated in the Graduate Writing Place writing groups (2019-present); and joined the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs 2020-2021 cohort of the Global Impacts program. I also have three years of administrative experience in higher education, working at the Office of the President at Sao Paulo State University (2012-2015).
Research
The Global Politics of Citizenship: Producing and Protecting the “Deserving” Subject
My current dissertation project explores the ethics involved in crafting legal categories in the margins of citizenship. I ask how deservingness has been enmeshed in the processes of creating and reforming law for non-citizens. I argue that notions of deservingness incentivize rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader notions of political responsibility. Deservingness inhabit the tense spaces between individual and collective responsibility, personal narratives and global crises (in the plural), and negotiations of equality and difference around citizenship, without ever resolving them - and that is why it is so effective.
Each chapter of my dissertation conducts an ethnographic exploration of how state representatives, advocacy organizations, NGOs, rights claimants, and scholars have negotiated limits in legal categories through desert, in this way establishing hierarchies within humanity and conditions for one to access rights. I begin with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; then I move on to international law on statelessness, refugees, and human trafficking; and end with current efforts to reform law in the United States (TPS and DACA).
I propose a critical exploration of the limits of law and assert that our current inability to propose effective solutions to rightless people requires a closer engagement with citizenship and its margins. Instead of assuming that national citizens deserve all, and that we have to come up with justifications to give gradations of rights to non-citizens, we should further explore the mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which (national) citizenship remains a privileged status. While there seems to be a relationship between law and deservingness, this connection remains underexplored in academia and either ignored or unquestionably accepted in public policy.
Teaching
Instructor of Record
Northwestern University/Political Science Department
International Relations Theory (Fall 2022)
Northwestern University/School of Professional Studies
Introduction to International Relations (Spring 2023)
Teaching Assistantships
Northwestern University/Sciences Po/Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle
Program in Art, Literature, and Contemporary European Thought
French Politics, Society, and Culture (Fall 2019)
Northwestern University
International Political Economy (Winter 2019)
Politics of Religious Diversity (Fall 2018)
Politics of the Middle East (Spring 2018, Winter 2017)
Introduction to International Relations (Spring 2019, Winter 2018, Spring 2017)
Introduction to Law in the Political Arena (Fall 2017, Fall 2021)
National Security (Fall 2016)
Foreign Aid and U.S. Foreign Policy (Spring 2022)
PUC-Rio
International Relations Theory (2011)
Course syllabi
International Relations Theory
Introduction to International Relations
Interpretive Methods
Deservingness, Law, and Public Policy
Teaching Certificate
Northwestern’s Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, 2018-2019
Yearlong combined seminars, workshops, mentoring, and discipline-specific discussions on learning goals, assessments, and evaluation. Emphasis on critical pedagogies and active learning.
Teaching Committee - Department of Political Science
Teaching Practicum
Training in Pedagogy
Publications & Public Scholarship
Op-Eds
Lessons learned from ‘Encanto’: Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature teaches us about flaws of U.S. immigration policy, Northwestern Now, 03/28/2022.
Granting temporary protected status to Ukrainians is a start, but it’s not enough, Chicago Tribune, 03/17/2022
Book Symposium
“A Conversation about the Politics of Rights within Rights as Weapons” (2019).
Book Symposium: A Discussion on Clifford Bob’s Rights as Weapons
Ethics and International Affairs Journal
Covid-19 in Brazil
“Feeding Agrarian Reform with Food Donations: a Covid-19 Story from Brazil” (2020).
Living With Plagues: New Narratives for a World in Distress Impressions and Reflections.
Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
Book Chapter
Tráfico de pessoas: questão das relações internacionais. In: Secretaria Nacional de Justiça. (Org.). I Prêmio Libertas: enfrentamento ao tráfico de pessoas. Brasília: BDJur- Biblioteca Digital Jurídica, 2010, p. 263-287.
Presentations
“Between morality and responsibility: the limits of human rights and the limits of the human” in ISA Human Rights & Foreign Policy 2021, June 2021.
"The limits of deservingness to address limits in law: a TPS story" in CRS & CERLAC 2021 Virtual Student Conference Recognition, Agency, and Deservingness: (Re)framing Refugee, Black, and Indigenous Movements, February 2021.
“Climate change, deservingness, and the limits in international law” in ISA Northeast Annual Conference 2020 - Transnationalism in World Politics: Beyond Methodological Nationalism in International Studies, November 2020.
“(Un)deserving Political Subjects: Entanglements and Detachments and the Limits of International Law” in Millennium: Journal of International Relations. 2020 Online Conference - Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics, October 2020.
"(Un)deserving Political Subjects: Hierarchies of Rights and the Limits of International Law" in ISA West Annual Conference 2020, September 2020.
1st New School Political Theory workshop in New York - “Autobiographies as political theory: self-healing and modern subjectivity in Mill and Nietzsche,” March 2020.
“The morality of migration: the national and its others in the United Nations (1945 -
1961)” at the conference Walls and Bridges: Migration and Its Histories, Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University, April 2019.
Northwestern's International Relations workshop - “The Brazilian State as Missionary: Differentiating Culture from Religion to Save Race,” November 2018.
New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) – The Relevance of Hannah Arendt - “Storytelling and statelessness: an exploration of the human limit in the writings of Hannah Arendt,” June 2018
“Tráfico de pessoas e demanda: o estereótipo da mulher brasileira e os valores sobre a prostituição” in Primer Congreso Latinoamericano sobre Tráfico y Trata de Personas, Centro de Investigación y Acción en Derechos Humanos y Desarrollo – CIADHUD, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June, 2008.