Larissa has a PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). She has worked on multiple projects at the João Pinheiro Foundation and is currently an independent researcher. Her research focuses on electoral systems and legislative institutions in various regions, from an intersectional perspective. Lately, she has started working on projects regarding politics in the digital sphere and transparency in science. She also co-hosts the podcast Brazil Nuts: an insane journey through the world of Brazilian politics.
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How do you find life as an independent researcher in Brazil? I’m doing this from Brazil (but am from Australia). Do you interact much with mainstream Brazilian Academia?
I’d also interested to hear your perspective on scientific transparency in Brazil. At the recent UNESCO webinar on open science, I was actually surprised to learn Latin America is considered to have very good open science infrastructure, such as Scilo (see my summary here)
Being an independent, that is, unemployed, researcher, is a little daunting, especially in this climate.
I finished my PhD last year, so yeah, I still have a lot of connections and interactions with other Brazilian academics (I did all my degrees at UFMG and I’m Brazilian).
I think we have a good track record with open access and with availability of data, but I wouldn’t say that it leads to a lot of transparency of methods, scripts, and datasets. There’s a lot of open data from governments, but researchers keep their constructions of that or their own builds to themselves, under lock and key.
And as far as the podcast goes, it’s actually hard choosing a topic because there’s so much stuff to talk about!
Hi, Alexander! I’m not important enough or subversive enough to be in danger.
In Brazil, people who are at risk are in the MST (landless movement), indigenous peoples, working with indigenous peoples, or investigative reporters. One person who was sadly killed for his investigations was a former police officer.
There have been a couple of famous academics and one federal deputy who left, fearing for their lives, but that’s more of a result of the current global polarisation than state sanctioned violence or censorship.
Also, since the pod is in English, I’m even more obscure lol
So I’ll talk about anything and everything. There’s really no danger to me. Thanks for asking!
I guess a recent one, with the title “Breaking Nuts: finding money where the sun don’t shine”, because we talk about the latest corruption scandal.
One named “The one with tragedies, farses, and vaccines” talks about current events such as the 2016 coup and the Vaccine Revolt in the early 20th century.
One that’s just called CENSORED is about the military dictatorship.
Also, would you and friends in brazil like to co-host the webinar, which poster draft is below? Lots open science (data, method, etc.) required for election forensics…
This looks super interesting! We have really good election data, I can’t wait to download this year’s batch (all the finance information takes a couple months after election day).
I’d love to discuss collaboration, how do we go about that?
