Dr Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti is a critical criminologist whose research interests lie at the intersections of southern, postcolonial and decolonial theory, transnational feminisms and carcerality. Building on these fields, her work theorises urban violence, issues of power and inequalities relating to gender, class and racialisation.

Dr Pessoa Cavalcanti's most recent projects focus on feminist activism, women's experiences of migration, police violence and the criminalisation of dissent in Latin America. She is currentling editting the second edition of The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South with Professor Kerry Carrington, Dr David Fonseca, Dr Valeria Vegh Weis, Professor Russell Hogg and Professor John Scott. She co-edited the 'Southern Perspectives on Policing, Security and Social Order' (Bristol University Press, 2023) with Zoha Waseem and Peter Squires.

She is the author of 'A Southern Criminology of Violence, Youth and Policing' (Routledge, 2020), co-founder and co-director of The Feminist Cities Colab, a member of the British Society of Criminology and the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. She is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Violence (NEV) at the University of São Paulo and also a visiting professor at UTPL university in Ecuador. She completed her PhD in 2017 at the Brazil Institute at King’s College London, and received a Master in Criminology in 2012 at the University of Brighton.

Prior to working at the University of Bristol, she worked at the University of Brighton, the University of Westminster and was a research fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress (Washington DC, USA) where she conducted research into declassified US government documents about international police assistance.

Her research has been funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Newton Fund-CONFAP, the British Academy and Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Current Projects

‘The Feminist Cities Lab: Contemporary Feminist Activism and Urban Violence in Latin America’ (2023-2025) [as co-investigator, KFSFF\100021]

Selected Media Appearances:

2023    Student Hours podcast.

2021    The Sociology Show podcast episode.

2020    Justice Focus podcast episode.

2020   Appeared on Headline.

2020 ‘Brazil: Will playing pandemic politics help or hurt Bolsonaro? Country faces mounting coronavirus death toll and prospect of increased military power’. Aljazeera, The Stream, 16/06/2020.

2020 Consulted by Castro, J.R. for ‘How Brazil’s Military Police became a key supporter of Jair Bolsonaro’. The Brazilian Report, 4/06/2020.