Justice Futures – Living a feminist life?

This is the second seminar in our Justice Futures series. 

Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, University of Bristol and Laurie Denyer Willis, University of Edinburgh.

Abstract:

In October 2025, mothers in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas searched for the bodies of their sons following the deadliest police inflicted massacre on record in the city. At the time of writing at least 121 people were killed in a single police operation (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR 2025). This paper examines the lived experiences of feminist, Black, and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders in Brazil as they navigate routine violence and shrinking democratic space. Grounded in ethnographic testimonies from feminist and women activists in Brazil, the research situates their experiences within the broader framework of intersectional and black feminism (hooks 2020; Alves da Silva 2024). This talk builds on the participatory research of the Feminist Cities Colab, a British Academy funded project that sheds light on how everyday life in cities become shaped by security discourses, policing as state repression and feminist resistance.

Through narratives of survival under Bolsonaro’s far-right regime—and the disillusionment that followed the return of leftist governance—the paper discusses how state-corporate violence and neoliberal dispossession converge to racialise insecurity and inflict an emotional toll on activism at the frontlines. Simultaneously, from contested politics emerge alternative infrastructures of care, collective protection, and political education, that reimagine uses of urban space, reconfiguring the city as both a site of international harms and a terrain of insurgent solidarity.

Drawing from feminist testimonies and theory, we will share a short documentary produced by a collective of feminist activists and scholars to support our argument that transnational feminist rights defenders articulate a critical epistemology of resistance that challenge dominant security paradigms. Their reflections expose how authoritarian strategies—surveillance, militarised policing, and neoliberal governance—are lived and contested through gendered and racialised bodies. In doing so, they expand the political imagination of what safety, justice, and democracy can mean in contexts of enduring colonial and patriarchal violence. Ultimately, these stories show how imagining feminist cities is part of a broader lived praxis of survival and resistance that challenge a global architecture of dispossession and authoritarianism.