Luisa Farah Schwartzman (On Leave)

Luisa Farah Schwartzman’s previous work investigates how classification and meaning-making around race, ethnicity and other social categories (class, nationhood, etc.) are implicated in the reproduction of inequality, and in efforts by researchers and contemporary government institutions to track and address the inequalities that have arisen from earlier, and ongoing, exclusionary use of such categories.  While much of her work is focused on Brazil, she and her collaborators have also studied other national contexts as well. Some of her prior research examined how race-based affirmative action in universities worked in Brazil, which is a context where the boundaries between “black” and “white” are relatively blurred, and where class identities are often more salient than racial ones. In another line of research, she worked to incorporate the idea of race as a socially constructed and relational concept into quantitative research about racial inequality.  She has also written about the relationship between race, ethnicity and the construction of national identity in Brazil and Canada.

In her more recent and ongoing work, she has become interested with interrogating the category of "the state" in its relationship to inequality, colonialism and racism.  In other words, how do we study territorial control, management of populations, political power, punishment, the law and the regulation of individuals' behavior in a world with multiple and overlapping jurisdictions, where "state-like" functions are performed by multiple actors, where public-private distinctions are blurred, and where the law itself and its application are contested?  Here, she and her collaborators are looking at problems such as (1) the historical emergence of colonial and Euro-dominated states and social structures around the Atlantic, in the context of pre-existing Indigenous, African and Afro-diasporic political and social institutions; (2) the contested definition of Haitian migrants as "refugees" as they move through different countries in the Americas; and (3) how social actors in Brazil mobilize law-making and law enforcement to resolve conflicts around social justice.