RESEARCH

RESEARCH PROJECTS AND PUBLICATIONS

Migration and Refugee Politics

My concluded and on-going research on international migration and refugee politics includes my dissertation entitled, Welcoming Migrants and Refugees: Governance, Labor, and Integration of Venezuelans in Brazil, which addresses two primary questions: 1) How are migrants and refugees integrated into local communities after being resettled, meaning which domestic or international actors play a role in this process? And 2) what vulnerabilities or barriers do migrants and refugees face while joining local labor markets, when we analyze their personal identities through a theoretical lens of intersectionality? I chose Venezuelan migration to Brazil since 2017 as a case study of this contemporary process, with a focus on the government’s reception and resettlement program called “Operation Welcome." My fieldwork was funded by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship and included 12 months of research across five field sites in Brazil where I gathered 290 semi-structured interviews, 60 participant observations, and over a 100 informal interviews. This grounded research approach has allowed me to theorize global migration governance from a bottom-up perspective, and highlight the role of migrant and refugee populations in providing feedback that alters resettlement and integration policies.

Works in progress include:

“Global Migration Governance: Actors, Structures, and Networks of Venezuelan Migration in Brazil,” José O. Pérez, Working Manuscript
“Street-level Bureaucrats and Migration: Governmentality, Agency, and Transformation in Contemporary Brazil,” José O. Pérez, Working Manuscript

Security Studies

My research in the vein of security studies has focused on the role of race and gender, often overlooked facets of international security, in impacting how individuals experience (in)security and vulnerability. These projects have included a host of mixed methods approaches ranging from discourse analysis, quantitative text analysis, media coverage analysis, interviews, to participant observations. For instance, I compared diplomatic performances, via speeches and other official documents, during the Luiz Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro presidential administrations in Brazil, to theorize how different diplomatic approaches can function to occlude on-going violence towards racialized populations (afro-Brazilians for the former, and Indigenous groups for the latter) during both administrations. These findings were published in Security Studies.

I have also conducted research on how gendered rhetoric and speech acts were employed as a form of symbolic political violence to legitimize the impeachment of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. This research included a quantitative and linguistic analysis of all floor speeches delivered during Rousseff’s impeachment, as well as media coverage of the impeachment process. I used these empirical findings to contribute towards feminist International Relations theory’s understanding of how gendered political violence is constituted through language acts that label some female state actors as “good leaders” and others as “bad leaders” in the world system. These findings were published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Finally, my research in security studies includes another project co-authored with Tarsis Brito (Post-doc at the London School of Economics), whose research outcomes are currently under review, where we compare Global North border technologies and refugee reception efforts to that of the Global South. For this project we employ Ceuta, Spain and Roraima, Brazil as two case studies, to examine how border control methods function (or not) to impede human mobility and seal off borders. We theorize that Global South states are not structurally positioned to have the same relationship vis-à-vis border closures and control methods that Global North states due, thereby leading to border control enforcement efforts that are only temporary or partial.

Publications include:

“Rethinking Migration Securitization: The Divide between South-North and South-South Migration Responses within the International System,” José O. Pérez and Tarsis Brito, Under Review
“Brazil’s Foreign Policy and Security Under Lula and Bolsonaro: Hierarchy, Racialization, and Diplomacy,” José O. Pérez, Security Studies 32.4-5 (2023): 653-679.
“The Dilma Rousseff Presidency: From Motherly Discourse to Queer Impeachment,” José O. Pérez, International Feminist Journal of Politics 24.1 (2022): 40-62.
“Lula, Dilma, and Temer: The Rise and Fall of Brazilian Foreign Policy,” André Reis da Silva and José O. Pérez, Latin American Perspectives 46.4 (2019): 169-185.

Global Health Politics

Previous research in global health politics includes my master’s thesis research, where I studied foreign Cuban medical workers working in remote areas of Brazil via the "Mais Médicos" ("More Doctors") international medical cooperation agreement between the two countries. While gathering interviews and conducting fieldwork for the project, I discovered most of the professionals sent as part of the medical cooperation agreement were women, and their main impact on local health systems was redefining patient-doctor relations, by delivering care in ways these local populations had never experienced before. I theorized these findings via a feminist International Relations theoretical lens, resulting in an article in Contexto Internacional, co-authored with André Reis (professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul).

Other research in this area includes an intersectional analysis of how different social groups experienced vulnerability in diverging and unique ways during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. For this work, I drew upon the Global Health Security literature within International Relations to analyze how female healthcare workers, domestic employees, and informal laborers were placed in varying situations of exposure to the virus vis-à-vis other groups of workers. This work resulted in a novel theoretical contribution, co-authored with Vinícius Mendes (Post-doc at Radboud University), which was published in Security Dialogue, where we read health insecurity within international politics via intersectionality. Health insecurity, we contend, positions certain bodies for biopolitical control and premature death, and others for security and safety. We sustain these claims via discourse analysis, documental analysis, and other qualitative methods.

Publications include:

“The Intersectionality of Health (In)Security: Healthcare, Disposable Workers, and Exposure within Brazil’s Pandemic Politics,” José O. Pérez and Vinícius Mendes, Security Dialogue 54.2 (2023): 155-172.
“Cuban Medical Internationalism through a Feminist Perspective,” José O. Pérez and André Reis da Silva, Contexto Internacional 41.1 (2019): 65-8.