Congratulations to the ÉRIGAL students winners of the SSHRC and FRQSC scholarships!
Emmanuelle Roy received the SSHRC Bombardier Fellowship for her master's degree.
Emmanuelle is a master's student in political science at the Université de Montréal and holds a bachelor's degree in International Relations and International law from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her interest in the Latin American region has been confirmed through her academic career as well as various stays in the Andean region. She is currently interested in studying Chilean and, more broadly, Latin American social movements. Her current research focuses on the role of citizen organizations, mainly feminist associations, in the drafting of a new constitution in Chile.
Her dissertation project is entitled "From the streets to the assembly: the impact of feminist groups in the constituent process in Chile"
Her research will focus on the role that citizen groups, specifically feminist organizations, played in the debates surrounding different articles of the draft constitution in Chile. She will participate in debates on the relationships and intersections between the state and social movements in a democratic context.
Three years after igniting a popular uprising against neoliberal policies and social inequality in 2019, the Chilean population overwhelmingly rejected the text of "the world's most feminist constitution" last fall in a referendum. Although the campaign was marked by a multitude of citizen initiatives to put feminist demands on the agenda (popular writing groups, awareness campaigns, etc.), this was not reflected in the numbers, with some items being especially controversial. Emmanuelle will therefore try to understand what impact these feminist initiatives have had, both in terms of putting citizens' demands, such as the right to abortion, on the constitutional agenda and in terms of raising public awareness. To do so, she will use a content analysis and conduct interviews in the fall of 2023.
Jonas Lefebvre received the FRQSC Doctoral Fellowship.
With a Master's degree in International Relations and a Master's degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Jonas explored the themes of activist engagement in Brazil and participatory initiatives in Belgium. Currently, his doctoral research focuses on citizenship in Brazil and, more specifically, on informal spaces of citizen participation.
His thesis project is entitled "Closing the democratic space and re-articulating social struggles: the resilience of social movement communities in the face of the de-institutionalization of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre (Brazil)"
In his dissertation research, Jonas is interested in exploring the consequences for social movements when participatory spaces are closed or weakened. Specifically, he aims to understand how local movements for the right to the city re-articulate themselves in response to the de-institutionalization of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which had been a space where their struggles had been durably incorporated. To achieve this, he will compare three regions of the city that have a strong associative tradition but currently present different dynamics of social mobilization.
Congratulations to Emmanuelle and Jonas!