Brazil Unfiltered

Leila Lehnen is the Chair of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. Her work uses literature to explore Brazilian society, culture, and history. As she she sees it, literature doesn’t just reflect a country's culture and politics -- it shapes it, too. On this episode of Brazil Unfiltered, Jim and Leila discuss what her work has taught her about contemporary Brazil, and how literatur...

On this episode of Brazil Unfiltered, James Green talks with Vera Paiva, a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sao Paulo. Vera is an expert on the ways societies deal with collective trauma, and how it affects everything from politics to public health. Her interest in the work is also personal; her father was a politician and activist who abducted, killed, and disappeared by the mi...

Some of the strongest opposition to Jair Bolsonaro has come from students and educators in Brazil, so it’s no surprise that Bolsonaro has framed Brazil’s education system as a threat to the country. For this last episode of the first season of Brazil Unfiltered, James Green talks with Sidney Chalhoub, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and a form...

On this episode: a deep dive into Brazil’s national and electoral politics. To do that, Jim Green talked with George Avelino, a Professor of Political Science at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, and director of the Center for Politics and Economics in the Public Sector.

Leah VanWey is a sociologist and expert on the effects of deforestation in Brazil [ https://www.brown.edu/academics/sociology/people/leah-vanwey ]. On this episode she and Jim Green explore the history, politics, and science of Brazil’s forests. Because how they're managed will affect not just Brazil's economy and environment, but the world's.

Debora Diniz is an anthropologist, activist, and former University of Brasilia law professor. Her life was utterly transformed last year, when she helped bring a case to Brazil’s Supreme Court to decriminalize abortion. Death threats were made against her. She received police protection, and went into hiding prior to the case’s final hearings. Today she’s living in exile in the US. On this episode...

On this episode of Brazil Unfiltered James Green talks with Ben Cowan, Associate Professor of History at UC San Diego and a leading expert on the history of Brazil’s military dictatorship. His 2016 book ‘Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil,’ looks at how cultural shifts in the 60s, 70s, and 80s -- especially changing attitudes towards sexuality and gender -- were...

On December 1, 2018, a group of activists and scholars met in New York to talk about the political crisis in Brazil. What came out of that meeting was the creation of US Network for Democracy in Brazil. James Green is currently serving as the National Coordinator of the Network, and on this episode of Brazil Unfiltered he talked with colleague Merina Adams, the Network’s National Organizer. They d...

It's impossible to understand contemporary Brazil without understanding life in the country's poorest and most marginalized communities. Watson Postdoctoral Fellow Nick Barnes lived in one such community -- a favela in Rio de Janeiro -- from 2012 to 2015. On this episode of Brazil Unfiltered, host James Green talks with Nick about life in Rio’s favelas: how they’re governed, how they were transfor...

March 14 marked the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Marielle Franco, a politician and activist in Rio de Janeiro. Her assassination shook the city -- and the country. On this episode of Brazil Unfiltered, a new podcast from the Watson Institute at Brown University, host James Green [ https://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty-fellows/green ] talked with Keisha-Khan Perry, an Associate Pr...