Congratulations to PhD candidate Roberta S. Pamplona on receiving the Muriel D. Bissell International Travel Award to support her dissertation research. Pamplona’s dissertation, “From Reckoning with Violence to Institutionalizing Rights: The Feminist Politics of Feminicídio in Brazil”, analyzes the role of feminist discourses and practices in the making of public policies and political mobilizations to cope with lethal violence against women. She links macro social changes to activists’ narratives to make sense of the contesting explanations on how feminists converted feminicídio into a salient frame for mobilizations against violence in the country. The Muriel D. Bissell Award supports Pamplona’s fieldwork in Brazil, where she is currently analyzing feminist and institutional documents on lethal violence against women, conducting interviews with activists from diverse backgrounds, and attending public meetings.
Roberta S. Pamplona is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests rely on the intersection of gender, law, and power. She focuses on lethal violence against women and the role of feminist ideas in challenging and reproducing local and global power inequalities. Roberta’s research contributes to our understanding of gender and violence as political categories within violent contexts and engages in theoretical debates in transnational feminist theory, socio-legal studies, and the sociology of violence.