Biography

Stefanie Israel de Souza is a sociologist with research interests in comparative urban marginality, criminology, culture, political sociology, social movements, race and ethnicity, and qualitative methods. She received her PhD from Notre Dame in 2019. At Notre Dame, she was also a PhD Fellow and Dissertation Year Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, which honored her with the 2019 Kellogg Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student Contributions.

Stefanie is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation project, Expiration Date: Mega-Events and Police Reform in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas. Expiration Date is a longitudinal ethnography of Rio’s favela “pacification” program, a proximity policing initiative that explicitly aimed to regain the state monopoly of violence in select favelas controlled by drug gangs in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Drawing on 27 months of ethnographic research conducted from the height of the program’s apparent success in 2012 to the post-Olympic fallout of 2017, the book analyzes how police-community-drug dealer relations in the favela evolve as mega-events come and go and the pacification initiative’s anticipated “expiration date” of 2016 draws near.

Stefanie’s research has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the United States Agency for International Development. An article based on her research at the height of the pacification initiative’s apparent success has been published in Sociological Forum.