The spatial history of São Paulo’s Brasilândia neighborhood reveals broader truths about the city. From its origins in the early twentieth century through the 1985 Black Women’s Collective celebration of the renaming of a public plaza to the city’s plan for its newest metro stop, Andrew Britt’s work shows how African descendants in São Paulo were persistently displaced and persistently present. The racialized space of Brasilandia tells a layered story of Black enslavement, forced migration, urban redevelopment, and Black self-determination, with echoes far beyond São Paulo.
From Our Fellows
The SSRC has been providing funding to researchers at all stages of their academic and professional careers for more than 90 years. Through a highly competitive and rigorous peer-review process, the SSRC has awarded over 15,000 fellowships and grants to support research around the globe. From Our Fellows focuses on emerging research in the social sciences, including intersections with the humanities and natural sciences, by recipients of SSRC funding. The SSRC’s fellowships, grants, and prizes improve conditions for social science knowledge production worldwide.
From Rapture to Rupture: Feminist Pornography and Beyond
by Celine Parreñas ShimizuWorks of sexual expression are often considered taboo, in common parlance. In academia, pornography remains a topic of research that while nominally acceptable, can still prompt questions about the personal qualities of the person pursuing the research. In her essay for our “Sexuality & Gender Studies Now” series, Celine Parreñas Shimizu details the history of her experiences as a research expert in boundary-breaking pornographic cinema. She brings our focus onto crucial social science questions, not only analyzing the gaze and production of these works, but also revealing the social biases that may challenge sexuality researchers when their subject itself breaks from the norm.
Bogotá’s Urban Development Conflicts: Insecurity & Memory in the City
by Federico PérezThe creation of, and responses to, Bogotá’s Center of Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation is one example that makes clear the fraught relationship of Colombia’s violent past to its urban future. Federico Pérez shows how city governments, developers, and ordinary people continue to assert their interests—symbolic, historical, and financial—over space in the Colombian capital, whether its demolishing a cemetery or fighting to preserve a working-class neighborhood. These conflicts put in sharp relief the connection between unresolved legacies of civil war and violence and urban space and renewal.
Comeback as Re-Settlement: Detroit, Anti-Blackness, and Settler Colonialism
by Jessi QuizarAs cities are gentrified by developers and new residents, their work is often cast as saving the city and repopulating an empty city in crisis, despite the fact that those spaces are occupied by longtime residents and workers. This is not a race-neutral discourse. Jessi Quizar’s research on Detroit shows the connection between the discourse around “urban pioneers” to Detroit and settler colonialism. And while Quizar’s work makes this connection eminently clear about white gentrifiers in a majority–African American Detroit, her work forces us to consider the language around gentrification more broadly: who is made visible and who is erased in policies about and discussions of urban development?
Reckoning with the Vulva, or The Two Words Your Feminist Sexuality Researcher Wants You to Say More
by Christine LabuskiDo the words we use matter? Christine Labuski argues they do, in particular the words we use to describe our sexual organs. For our “Sexuality & Gender Studies Now” series, she challenges society’s unwillingness to use the correct terminology when describing women’s sexual body parts, using “vagina” as a catch-all term. Through her research, Labuski calls attention to how detrimental to women it can be to not use the more precise term “vulva.” Additionally, she emphasizes the need for more interdisciplinary research on the vulva—beyond the medical—that critically engages with gender, sexuality, the cultural, and the political aspects of a woman’s body.
Constructing Bipartisan Coalitions to Pass Legislation
by Lynda W. PowellOver the last 30 years, party polarization has increased, making bipartisan compromise less attainable. In this essay, Lynda Powell identifies the electoral and institutional factors influential in determining the extent to which individual legislators spend time forming cross-party rather than within-party coalitions to pass legislation. Focusing her analysis on individual legislator behavior, she introduces a new measure of legislative activity—coalition building bipartisanship—defined as the difference in time legislators devote to cross-party versus within-party coalition building to pass legislation. Overall, Powell finds that in state capitols as well as Congress, as time goes on, legislators spend more time building within-party coalitions, rather than bipartisan coalitions.
Action in Polarized Times: Understanding the Legislative Strategy of the Congressional Black Caucus
by Mamie E. LockeOver the course of nearly 50 years, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has developed many strategies and negotiating tools to become an effective organization in Congress. Here, Mamie Locke explores how the CBC has grown from its original 13 members from relatively homogeneous districts to a caucus reflecting greater geographic and demographic diversity. She argues these changes in membership allow the CBC to more readily engage in deliberative negotiation and strategic partnerships to meet its mission of empowering marginalized communities. The CBC has leveraged its collective power to animate a policy agenda determined to move minority communities forward. Despite facing an increasingly polarized environment for the past 20 years, CBC members have formed alliances and worked in a bipartisan way to achieve successful legislative outcomes.
Reflecting on Mentorship, Collaboration, and the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program
by Pablo MitchellPablo Mitchell illustrates the importance of mentorship in fostering new generations of academics, in particular in emerging fields. As part of the “Sexuality & Gender Studies Now” series, he reflects on the role his mentors played in cultivating his scholarship on the history of Latinx sexuality. Highlighting the importance of researching the history of sexuality of minorities within the broader history of the Americas, Mitchell looks to the future of the field and advocates for increased research on Latinx sexuality.
The National Reputations of Moderate Senators
by Logan DanceyA consequence of increasing polarization is the decline of moderate legislators—those who occupy an ideological middle ground between the two parties. This decline has allowed those moderates to play pivotal roles, especially in the Senate, in deciding whether a bill passes or fails or a nominee is confirmed or not. Yet little is known about whether these moderate senators play an influential role in shaping public opinion around pieces of legislation. Using a survey experiment, Logan Dancey investigates whether public support for specific bills changes depending on who sponsors (and cosponsors) the legislation. His findings suggest that although names like Susan Collins and Joe Manchin are well-known among American voters, when moderates attach their name to pieces of legislation, it does not uniquely influence public support for or opposition to the bill.
Pulling Strings: Congressional Leaders, Party Discord, and the Lessons of the Midcentury
by Ruth Bloch RubinIt is commonly believed that congressional leaders will always obey the “first commandment” of party leadership: Thou shalt not aid bills that will split thy party. Nevertheless, in 2017 House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allowed voting on a bid to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), putting on display their party’s ideological divisions. In this Democracy Papers essay, Ruth Bloch Rubin draws on the personal papers of midcentury House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) to understand when and why congressional leaders choose to act as agents of discord. She investigates how Rayburn used intraparty tensions to push for his agenda. Bloch Rubin argues that Rayburn’s tactics provide a new angle for understanding contemporary congressional action like the ACA bill.