Rafael de Souza

Rafael de Souza is a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) where he is part of the Political Institutions and Social Movements Nucleus and is a postdoctoral fellow at CEBRAP’s International Postdoctoral Program. He works in the field of political sociology and social movement theory, with an emphasis on the relationship between politics and urban space in the construction of activism. De Souza has been using Protest Event Analysis to investigate how different spatial embeddedness has influenced the tactics, agendas, and collective identities of political organizations in the streets. He is currently developing a postdoctoral research project, titled “The City in Dispute: Routine and Innovation of Protest Places and Performances in São Paulo (2011–2016).” His interests in Covid-19 deals with the ongoing violent political episodes in Brazilian cities and seeks to understand how differences in public places and urban contexts mediate the radicalization and polarizations of contentious politics.