Aleida Mendes Borges completes her LAHP-funded PhD

Congratulations to Aleida Mendes Borges, PhD student at King’s College London Department of Spanish Portuguese and Latin American Studies,  who has recently completed her LAHP-funded PhD.
Aleida’s thesis centres on youth associations in Lusophone Africa, which are emerging participatory spaces arising in political landscapes shaped by mainstream models of hierarchical power. It examines how going beyond public protests, youth groups have, in the last decade (2010-2020), begun to re-organise in the form of community associations to ‘get things done’ (fazer acontecer). The project illustrates the potential for civil society actors to ‘unseat’ elements of ‘authority’ through the development of horizontal relations among members and provide the space for alternative expressions of political participation. These initiatives ‘from the margins’ surface as a counter-hegemonic movement against the dominance of traditional elites over the domain of the ‘political’.