Biography

Josefa Maria Stiegler has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research (ISR) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2024. She studied Urban Studies (Malmö University) and Gender Studies (University of Vienna) and completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Vienna in October 2023. In her dissertation, “Em Nome do Estado: A Feminist, Decolonial Analysis of Everyday (In)Securities in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas”, she examined how urban space and (in)security are intertwined and how they reproduce and reinforce gendered, racialized and class-based power relations. Using the example of the political activism of Black mothers against police violence in Rio de Janeiro's favelas, she analyzed how these dynamics generate inequalities and insecurities. Her research focuses on the collective forms of solidarity and resistance that emerge from these dynamics, creating new spaces of agency in marginalized urban areas. From 2017 to 2021, Josefa worked as a university assistant (pre-doc) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. In 2022, she was awarded the doctoral completion grant from Literar-Mechana. After completing her PhD in 2023, she was a guest researcher at Umeå University (Sweden) and received the PostDoc-Track Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Research Interests

• Urban violence and (in)securities
• Protest and collective resistance
• Insurgent planning
• Feminist, decolonial methodologies

Recent publications

Stiegler, J. M. (2026) Doing justice through and beyond the state: Black mothers’ struggle against police violence in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, European Journal of Politics and Gender (Early View)

Stiegler, J. M. (2026) Material traces of collective mourning: memorial space-making of Black mother activists in a Rio de Faneiro favela, AMBIENTES: Revista de Geografia e Ecologia Política 8(1), 104-131.

Stiegler, J. M., Haselbacher, M. & Reeger, U. (2026)Inklusion, Exklusion und (Un-)Sicherheiten im öffentlichen Raum. Eine Gegenüberstellung der Perspektiven von Stakeholderinnen und junger Nutzerinnen in Wien, ISR Forschungsbericht Heft 65, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.