DrSara Leon Spesny

Policing, The Police, The Policed: My most recent research project in based on an ethnographic account of the work of the military police in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Specifically, this project looks into the ways the police maintain the urban and symbolic borders of the city. These sort of state-led initiatives supposedly integrate the favela to the city. However, “soft” policing strategies that include narratives of human rights, democracy and citizenship often perpetuate a war on drugs and ultimately end up reinforcing precisely the borders they were set up to erase.

Violence, human rights, citizenship & postcoloniality: This research project intersects more broadly with issues of human rights and citizenship in the postcolonial Latin American city. I argue that police violence should be analysed beyond individual moral characteristics of police officers (lawful agents and unlawful ones) including a historically situated understanding of the present moral economy of violence. Police violence is legitimate -or not- according to whom it is directed to. In this sense, we need to redefine what citizenship means and the implications of claiming citizenship rights for marginalized populations. I conceptualize the police in Brazil (as in other Latin American countries) and the (dis)order it produces as a postcolonial entity that is intrusive in their absence and illusive in their presence.

The Politics of Maternal Health, Inequality and Care: I have been interested in health issues for more then a decade, taking into account the particularities of historical, political and cultural contexts. I have carried out research specifically in maternal health, focusing on how attention given to vulnerable populations (undocumented migrants) is shaped by different factors, including health professional’s moral views of women, their bodies and their babies. An informed anthropology can bring together the embodied experience of women with the larger milieu of institutions, policies and histories of power and inequality.I have focused in Latin American contexts, specifically Costa Rica and Brazil.