Angela Randolpho Paiva

Angela PaivaAfrican American Policy Forum » Angela Paiva
...
Home » Protected: Bellagio Reading Room » Shelf 2: Participant biographies and articles » Brazil » Angela Paiva
...
Angela Paiva
...
Angela Paiva
...
Angela Randolpho Paiva

Angela R. Paiva is a sociology professor at the Graduate and Undergraduate programs at PUC - Rio, Catholic University of Rio and the director of PUC/NIREMA - Interdisciplinary Center for African-descendant Research and Heritage.

She got her first M.A in Education, at the University of Connecticut, and then in Sociology at IUPERJ - Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, and her PhD in Sociology at IUPERJ.While completing her doctoral program, she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where she did research at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.

Her main focus of analysis is the question of citizenship and human rights in a sociological perspective.Her doctoral thesis, which was awarded the best thesis of IUPERJ in 2000, was a comparative analysis between Brazil and the United States on the construction of citizenship through religious ethos, which resulted in the publication of her book Católico, protestante, cidadão (Catholic, protestant, citizen).

Due to her recent involvement with NIREMA, she has lately focused the issue of human rights in racial relations.Due to the first program of affirmative action implemented in a state university in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, she organized a seminar on "Education and citizenship for Afro-Brazilians" in order to foster further reflection on real experiences of affirmative action in higher education, both in Brazil and in the United States.As a result, she organized the book Ação afirmativa na universidade: reflexão sobre experiências concretas (Affirmative action in universities: reflection on concrete experiences).

At present, she is the coordinator of two research projects carried on by Nirema: the first, a research on racial discrimination in Rio de Janeiro in the last 20 years, funded by Ford Foundation; the second, a comprehensive research on affirmative action policies in all Brazilian universities (both federal and state) in order to follow and evaluate the process that is taking place at present.