Dr Juliana Santos De Carvalho

LLB (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, summa cum laude), LLM (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, cum laude), PhD (Geneva Graduate Institute, summa cum laude with special commendation)

Throughout my academic career, I have been interested in the exciting possibilities that arise when looking at international law, international relations, and feminist/queer studies from a transdisciplinary perspective. This interest has allowed me to explore how we can employ a feminist and queer sensitivity to destabilise and reconstruct foundational concepts of the international legal discipline and practice. In my doctoral thesis, this interest has pushed me to develop a specific grammar to understand how people identify and construct international legal norms—especially those related to gender concerns—, where I focused on three cases: (1) the Women, Peace and Security agenda of the UN Security Council; (2) the Yogyakarta Principles on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Rights; and (3) the non-definition of gender in the draft Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. For that, instead of taking the non-binding, sometimes ‘weird’ format of those norms as ‘failed’ attempts at creating international legal rules, I zoomed in on the different setbacks, strategies, and relative successes feminist and queer transnational activists have faced when attempting to those norms as legal in their own terms. This called for an empirically grounded research on international legality, as opposed to the often theoretically-heavy approach employed to study it.

Aside from my feminist/queer exploration of international legality, I have also contributed to research projects on diversity and representation in the international judiciary, queer approaches to international legal methods, as well as decolonial practices in feminist academic publishing.

I am currently working on a monograph proposal derived from my doctoral research.

• 2023 – Awarded a doc.mobility grant from Swissuniversities to pursue a Visiting Research Student program at SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media
• 2019 – Awarded a full scholarship from the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists to pursue a PhD in International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute
• 2017 – Awarded a Vrije Universiteit Fellowship Programme to pursue an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security
• 2016 – Awarded an academic merit medal for achieving the highest academic index of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte Law Class of 2016.2.