Biography

Maíra Magalhães Lopes is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra (UC). Prior to her doctoral education at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University (where she focused her research on the politics of consumption and consumer culture), her education was focused on the field of public administration. She did a Master of Public Management at SDA Bocconi, in Milan, Italy. Previously, she did her bachelor's in Public Administration at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP), in São Paulo, Brazil. At CES, she works in the UNPOP project (FCT, 2021-2024), which aims to compare the formation of emotion narratives and their effects on political behavior with a focus on right-wing parties in Portugal and Italy. Her main research interests - in alignment with UNPOP's focus - are emotions and politics. Being influenced by Sara Ahmed's perspective on emotions, her research focuses on the surfacing effects of emotions in shaping collective bodies. In her postdoctoral research at CES, with the UNPOP project, she aims to explore the cultural politics of emotions embedded in the narratives of right-wing parties in the current populist time. Whereas in her doctoral research, she explored (a) the cultural politics of emotions and (b) the making of crowds through affective synchronization in the context of urban activism in São Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests also cover: politics of consumption, consumer culture, neoliberal-colonial normativity, resistant collective action, and social movements.