Women in Movement: Gender Roles, Networks & Informal Politics

The overall objective of this project is to understand how changing gender roles shape forms of political leadership. This project's specific objectives are to (i) describe the reasons why women engage in political activism; (ii) identify the forms of political participation that women engage in, (iii) identify the problems that women are asked to solve and (iv) analyze the strategies for problem solving that women use and the networks that they rely on considering the current political polarization. Overall, this project investigates how low-income women situate themselves in positions of community leadership in a particular context marked by 1) increasing poverty and urban violence that puts a burden on women in particular; and 2) rampant authoritarian populism in Brazil that makes specific claims against women’s rights, autonomy and integrity.