Camila’s PhD project is an ethnographic exploration of the day-to-day dynamics of Brazilian grassroots groups formed by women. Her work investigates how these groups actively create and assert rights, focusing on the bottom-up formation of rights languages, Brazilian popular feminism, and the internal and external power relations within social movements. This research contributes to broader debates on rights cultures and feminist activism in Latin America.
In addition to her research, Camila is an active member of the academic community at Lund University. She is a member of the Doctoral Student Union, serves as a PhD representative on the union's election committee, and represents PhD students in the department's Equality, Equal Treatment, and Diversity group. In her role at Lund University, Camila has facilitated courses including 'Human Rights in the History of Politics and Philosophy' and 'The Global and Local in Human Rights'. Additionally, she created the course 'Human Rights in Latin America: Between Top-down Politics and Bottom-up Resistance'. She also supervises Master's students and has organized symposiums and workshops related to her areas of expertise.
In addition to her university funding, Camila's research has been supported by grants such as the Erasmus+ Mobility Grant, Stiftelsen Fil dr Uno Otterstedt's Grant for the Promotion of Scientific Research and Teaching, the Hilma Borelius Research Grant, and the ACCESS Forum Travel Grant.
Camila can be contacted at camila.freitas_de_souza@mrs.lu.se or cfreitasdesouza@berkeley.edu
Camila Freitas de Souza is a Latin American scholar pursuing a PhD in the Department of History–Human Rights Studies Division at Lund University (Sweden). With a strong interdisciplinary background, she holds an MSc in Urban Studies (Malmö University, Sweden), and an MSc in Gender, Justice, and Society (Umeå University, Sweden), building upon her Bachelor's degree in Social Communication from the Catholic University of Pernambuco, Brazil. Her research focuses on grassroots movements, decolonial knowledges, Latin American feminisms, the vernacularization of rights cultures, and the study of Latin American geographies.