The Contributions of Community-Led Newspapers to the Resilience of Rio’s Maré and Rocinha Favelas During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vanessa Guerra
Assistant Professor in Urban and Environmental Planning
School of Architecture
University of Virginia

Dr. Max O. Stephenson, Jr.

Dr. Max O. Stephenson, Jr.
Professor, Urban Affairs and Planning (UAP)
Director, Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance
School of Public and International Affairs
Virginia Tech

Desirée Poets
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Core Faculty of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
(ASPECT) PhD Program

Molly Todd

Molly Todd
Teaching Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and the International Affairs Program
University of Colorado Boulder

The Contributions of Community-Led Newspapers to the Resilience of Rio’s Maré and Rocinha Favelas During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Vanessa Guerra, Max Stephenson, Desirée Poets, and Molly F. Todd
Journal of Urban Affairs
| June 2024

This article explores how two community-led newspapers in Maré and Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, promoted social resilience in their respective favelas during the first 6 months of COVID-19. We reviewed stories published in both newspapers and interviewed a sample of their journalists to investigate the newspapers’ responses to the pandemic’s effects, government policies (or lack thereof), and resident reactions to evolving virus-related risks during our study period. We employed Keck and Sakdapolrak’s social resilience framework to examine our data and found that the newspapers contributed significantly to the resilience of both communities during our study period. Contrary to the neoliberal view of resilience as self-reliance, these newspapers sought instead to encourage sustained collective agency and to challenge oppressive governance through generative activities and advocacy. Our findings deepen understanding of the role of community-organized activities in marginalized populations’ struggles to assert their right to the city, particularly during crises.

Vanessa Guerra is an assistant professor in Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture. She focuses her research, teaching, and practice on urban interventions that promote social inclusion and sustainable development in cities and regions. Her research interests include urban informality, urban resilience, inclusive cities, spatial justice, coproduction, and cognitive urbanism. Prior to her position at UVA, she served as a research associate and Interim Program Director of Rhizome LLC at Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies and as a consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Max O. Stephenson, Jr. serves as a professor in the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). With a distinguished career in public policy, civil society studies and public administration, he also serves as the Director of the Institute for Policy and Governance. He holds a Ph.D. in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. Dr. Stephenson’s research interests include civil society, democratic governance and political agency, and social equity and social change, reflected in his extensive publication record and numerous academic contributions. He is recognized for his interdisciplinary approach, integrating constructs from political science, public administration, and community development to address complex social challenges.

Desirée Poets is Assistant Professor of Political Science and a core faculty of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) PhD Program. Through ethnographically informed, creative, and collaborative methods, Poets has been working with urban Indigenous, favela, and maroon (in Portuguese, quilombola) communities and movements in Brazil’s Southeast Region since 2013. Her research focuses on settler colonial, postcolonial, and dependency theories in Latin America; urban (de-)militarization; arts, collective memory and community change, and questions of gender, ethnicity, class, and race.

Molly Todd is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the International Affairs Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. She earned her PhD in 2023 from the interdisciplinary ASPECT program at Virginia Tech, where her research focused on community-engaged art and borders in the Americas. Her research employs collaborative methods across sites in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States to observe & participate in the ways that artistic production navigates and shapes border politics and their imaginaries. She has published several articles reflecting these efforts, as well as a chapter in the edited volume Maré from the Inside: Art, Culture, and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (VT Publishing 2021).