Speaker: Mariana Possas

Title: "Human Rights are for Criminals!": Moral Discourses on Human Rights and Police Violence in Contemporary Brazil

Speaker: Dr. Mariana Possas is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Ottawa.

Abstract: The world has recently seen an increase in anti-human rights discourses. While in some countries this discourse has been associated with opposition to immigration, in Latin America, anti-human rights ideas are mainly related to a decades-long urban violence crisis. In Brazil, many see human rights as an anti-police discourse that serves only to shield criminals from punishment, leaving law-abiding' citizens' vulnerable. Recently, the rise of the far-right in the country has amplified this idea. The present talk addresses an ongoing research project on human rights discourses in Brazil. The two main objectives of the research are (1) to analyze how anti-human rights discourses have been mobilized in Brazilian traditional and social media; (2) to look at how Brazilians living in Canada, a country officially committed to human rights protection, perceive human rights.