Juliana Berger Valente

JULIANA VALENTE, then a graduate student at City University of New York, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in September 2023 to aid research on “Writing Oneself into the Brazilian Nation: The Use of IDs by Criminalized Youth,” supervised by Dr. John Collins. The project turns to bureaucracies and the use of IDs by criminalized youth to understand the shifting contours of citizenship, equality, and rights in Brazil’s current liberal democratic project. The fieldwork investigated interactions between youth and bureaucrats as they move to co-construct the categories and protocols through which formal inclusion, citizenship, and rights are defined and lived in democratic nation that demonstrates some of the world’s highest levels of inequality. It considered: How are mutating bureaucratic institutions establishing (or not) the conditions and terms of formal equality in Brazil? How might youth attempt to negotiate the terms and promise of equality by inscribing genres of self-fashioning onto papers or contesting state protocols for doing so? What do transactions around documents demonstrate about the many facets of liberalism, as different actors with varying levels of power co-construct conditions of belonging and equal inclusion into the nation? Participant observation was conducted with youth navigating bureaucratic mazes to obtain IDs, and archival research traced the histories and regulations shaping different bureaucratic programs that emit IDs. The research pushes social scientific understandings of citizenship and contemporary governance during a moment of deepening political polarization globally.