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Biography
Fernanda Amaral is an Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Culture, Media and Visual Studies at the 糖心原创. She holds a PhD in Media Discourse and is the author of 'Voices from the Favelas: Media Activism and Counter-narratives from below' (2021). Her research focuses on the intricate interplay between misrepresentation, violence and memory, analysing the transformations heralded by the introduction of technology into the struggles to produce counter-narratives and counter-memories. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she explores the development of new cultures of remembrance, especially in the Global South. Her current projects include research into post-memories of victims of police massacres, funded by the British Academy, and an in-progress monograph on Mediating Memories of the Stockwell shooting.
Expertise Summary
Fernanda's research is interdisciplinary and has focused on the transformations heralded by the introduction of modern communication technology on struggles for voice, justice, and memory. Her main reflections gravitate around counter-narratives of police-citizen encounters that challenge the mainstream representation and memories of those events, with a particular emphasis on racialised regimes of representation and remembrance, and activist memory.
Research Summary
BASRG Inherited Memories: How recollections of historical police massacres shape new generations' lives in the Brazilian favelas
This British Academy funded research will analyse the impact of historical police massacres on subsequent generations in affected communities, aiming to address a crucial gap in scholarship by exploring how individuals who did not directly experience the events are still profoundly affected by them decades later. It will also examine the role of mediated narratives in this process and produce two significant outputs that will contribute to a larger project on the memories of police violence and cultures of resistance in South America.
Monograph: Jean Charles de Menezes: Mediation, Spectacle and the Politics of Memory (provisional title). Palgrave Macmillan.
This book offers a timely and critical intervention into the cultural memory of state violence, media representation, and transnational mourning. Drawing on a series of in-depth ethnographic interviews and the careful analysis of official reports, newspaper articles, and hearing transcripts, it explores the mediation of the London Attacks and the killing of jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, identifying and discussing the main narratives and the political discourse behind them. It also examines the construction and endurance of collective memories surrounding Jean Charles de Menezes's death, culminating in an analysis of the impact of recent TV adaptations of the event on public recollections and emotional responses.
Recent Publications
AMARAL, FERNANDA, 2022. Memory Studies.
AMARAL, FERNANDA, 2021. Voices from the favelas: media activism and counter-narratives from below Rowman & Littlefield.
AMARAL, FERNANDA, 2021. The militarisation of the security forces and the targeting of the poor: an analysis of the rise in police brutality in Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic.. In: PRICE, STUART and HARBISHER, BEN, eds., Power, Media, and the Covid 19 Pandemic: framing public discourse. Routledge. 123-135
HANSKA, MAX, BAHIYA, AHMED, AMARAL, FERNANDA and SUI, YU, 2020. Communications -The European Journal of Communication Research.