Vivi Brassói is a Romani feminist activist and human rights lawyer with extensive experience in strategic litigation, Roma rights advocacy, and community-driven research. She is a graduate of the Central European University Roma Graduate Preparation Program (2016) and holds a JD (2017) and an LLM in European Human Rights from ELTE University, Budapest (2024). In her previous role as Legal Director of the European Roma Rights Centre, she focused on supporting Romani people in making cutting-edge legal arguments, both in and out of court, to achieve radical change across Europe in multiple thematic areas, including the reproductive rights of Romani women and addressing intersectional discrimination.
Within her role as a four-year PhD candidate in the PERIODS project, taking place at both Wageningen University, Netherlands and Central European University, Hungary, she leads the Roma case study, which explores how Romani identity, gender, and menstruation intersect by centring the lived experiences of Romani menstruators, examining how compounded stigma of identity and menstrual status shapes their access to human rights, and using these insights to inform movement building and the reframing of human rights from the grassroots.
Vivi's co-supervisors are Dr. Inga Winkler (Associate Professor in Human Rights, Wageningen) and Dr. Angéla Kóczé (Associate Professor and Chair of the Romani Studies Program, CEU).
The position is part of the PERIODS project on Human Rights in the Menstrual Movement funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Inga Winkler. It is embedded in the Law Group chaired by Prof. Louis Kotzé at Wageningen University.
About the project: The period emoji, the year of the period, and an Oscar-winning documentarywith menstruation gaining attention at all levels, PERIODS explores the promises, pitfalls, and renewed potential of human rights in the menstrual movement. While research, policy, and practice on menstruation to date largely focus on tangible, material needs and risk leaving menstrual stigma and its role in perpetuating gender injustices intact, PERIODS recognizes that menstrual stigma and unmet menstrual needs have profound effects on the human rights to health, bodily integrity, education, work, and participation in social, cultural, and public life. The project centers the social practice of human rights in the menstrual movement by drawing on the articulations of lived experiences of people who menstruate and perspectives of movement leaders. It will examine if social movements reframe how human rights related to menstruation are understood and if so, how they move beyond the dominant reductionist framings in favor of a holistic, inclusive, and expansive conceptualization of human rights. The project combines empirical research using in-depth interviews, focus groups, qualitative surveys, and document analysis with conceptual work grounded in human rights. Theoretically, the project is rooted in the critical engagement with human rights and a re-envisioning of human rights from below'. It considers the practice of human rights in the menstrual movement as constitutive of what matters for the realization and conceptualization of human rights. By connecting global and local struggles and movements in the global South and North, PERIODS will not only develop a thicker, more nuanced understanding of human rights in the menstrual movement, but also has the potential to generate significant empirical insights from a young, translocal, global South-driven movement for the reconceptualization of human rights based on social practice.
For more information about the PERIODS project please visit the related links:
Human rights and public health | WUR
https://www.ceu.edu/article/2023-05-24/inga-winkler-connects-menstrual-h...