Rate My Professor Sara Motta

Associate Professor Sara Motta serves in the Discipline of Politics and International Relations within the Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy from the University of London, a Master of Science in the Politics of Development with a focus on Latin America from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics in 2005, supervised by Dr Francisco Panizza and Professor Rodney Barker. Her career trajectory includes appointment as Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Newcastle in May 2013, with subsequent promotion to Associate Professor. Earlier roles encompass a Lectureship in Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham in 2007, and a three-year Tutorial Fellowship in Comparative and Latin American Politics in the Government Department at the London School of Economics.

Motta's research specializations center on the politics of subaltern resistance, particularly in Latin America, including new forms of popular politics, political subjectivities, and ways of life transcending neoliberalism in contexts such as Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia. She develops critical readings of political science and comparative politics through decolonial theory, black and Chicana feminist theory, post-anarchy, open Marxism, and community-produced theories. Additional interests include the politics of knowledge production, linkages between knowledge, power, and exclusion, democratizing knowledge creation, and the pedagogy of dissent via popular and critical education for social justice. Her fields of research comprise citizenship (33%), gender and politics (34%), and global Indigenous studies peoples, society and community (33%). She is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish. Key publications include Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (2018), winner of the 2019 Best Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association; The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (2021, co-edited with S.A. Hosseini, J. Goodman, B.K. Gills); Reoccupying the Political: Transforming and Transgressing Political Science (2019, with J. Jose); Constructing 21st Century Socialism in Latin America: The Role of Radical Education (2014, with M. Cole); and Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance (2011, with A.G. Nilsen). Selected recent articles are 'Decolonizing and feminizing citizenship otherwise: enfleshment from the borderlands of (non)being' (2025, with T. Seppälä, Globalizations); 'Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised, indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university' (2024, Journal of International Political Theory); and 'F*** Professionalism: or Why We Cannot Return to “Normal”' (2020, Gender Work and Organization). In 2024, she received the University of Newcastle's ADVANCE Equity in Research Fellowship.