Juliana Valente

Grad Student Assistant

Student Fellow

Juliana Valente is a PhD candidate in the cultural anthropology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current project interrogates notions of citizenship and belonging by looking at how criminalized youth in Brazil obtain and make use of identity documents. She is interested in understanding how bureaucratic institutions produce the apparatuses of surveillance that are nevertheless key for making claims to rights. Furthermore, she seeks to shed light on how people push back on such projects through their creative uses of IDs. Prior to beginning her PhD, Juliana worked at an NGO in Brazil with youth convicted of committing crimes. She received her master’s in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and her Bachelors in sociology and education from Vassar College.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.

2025–2026

Mobility: Transit and Transformation

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities.