Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2018)
M.Phil. in Latin American Studies, University of Oxford, UK (2011)
B.A. in Philosophy and Culture, University of Witten/ Herdecke, Germany (2009)
Marta-Laura Haynes is a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Major Coordinator for the Deviance, Crime, and Culture Program. Dr. Haynes has extensive ethnographic research experience in Brazil where she studied issues related to policing, violence, race, gender, and trust. She is specifically interested in so-called "democratic" or "innovative" policing projects in the Global South, that introduce new technologies and policing models.
Her book manuscript titled Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil (forthcoming with Columbia University Press) is based on years of fieldwork (2010-2015) with the Pacification Police Units in Rio de Janeiro and the Pact for Life program in Recife, Brazil. The book takes trust as its ethnographic object, working through its racialized and gendered politics. At its core, it asks: What does it mean to trust in a world shaped by violence and inequality? This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble. Far from being a universal ideal, trust emerges as deeply entangled with local hierarchies of race, gender, and class, reflecting and reinforcing broader societal inequalities. By framing trust as an active process—something performed, negotiated, and contested—this book redefines how we understand its role in shaping social and political life while also exposing the pervasive and often generative role of mistrust.
Over the years, Dr. Haynes has worked with non-profit organizations devoted to social justice issues, such as the Madison Public Library's Making Justice Program, where she worked with court-involved youth; the Brazilian Think Tank Igarapé Institute, the BRICS Policy Center and Center for Digital Inclusion in Rio de Janeiro, and the Goethe Institut in São Paulo.
Dr. Haynes is Polish-German and speaks German, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek.
Current courses
ANT100 Ethnography of Youth & Justice; ANT230 Culture & Crime; ANT325 Ethnographic Research Methods
Previous courses
Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA)
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Marta-Laura Haynes. 2023. "Under mother's eyes: Black gaze, state violence, and resilience in Rio de Janeiro." Feminist Anthropol 5: 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12114
Haynes, Marta-Laura. 2023. "Enforcing Trust: Race, gender, and the policing of citizenship in Rio de Janeiro." City & Society 35 (1): 14–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12447.
Haynes, Marta-Laura. 2021. "Qualifying Violence: Visible Data, Invisible Lives in Recife, Brazil." The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 26: 468-487. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12569
Haynes, M.-L. 2020. [Review of the book Understanding Contemporary Brazil, by Jeff Garmany and Anthony Pereira]. Luso-Brazilian Review 57(2), E11-E13. https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/782709.
Suska, M.-L. (2018). Foreword. In DD Armstrong (eds.), The Beyond Words Anthology – Madison Uncut. (pp.9-12). London: Smash and Grab Books Press.
Suska, M.-L. (2018). “Favela.” In Ledeneva A. (ed.), Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 2: Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity (pp. 23-27). London: UCL Press.
Suska, M.-L. (2015). Recommendations for Two Violence-Reducing Policing Programs in Brazil: The Pacification Police Unit in Rio de Janeiro and the Pact for Life in Recife, (also available in Portuguese), Rio de Janeiro: BRICS Policy Center.
Suska, M.-L. (2009). Book Review of “Reflexion zu Ernst Tugendhat’s Kritik an Immanuel Kants Moralkonzept,” Germany: GRIN Verlag.
The CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP), 2020
Andrew W. Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship, 2017
SSRC Drugs, Security, and Democracy Fellowship, 2014
Scott-Kloeck Jenson International Internship Award, 2014
Tinker & Nave Research Award, 2013
Marta-Laura Haynes is a cultural anthropologist and brazilianist interested in policing, urban violence, race, gender, inequality, and social justice. Her dissertation work was an ethnographic study of two public security programs, the Pacification Police in Rio de Janeiro and the Pact for Life in Recife. Between 2010 - 2015 she conducted intensive fieldwork in Rio and Recife, where she shadowed military police and homicide task force, policymakers, and lived in favela communities to explore their attempts at "democratic policing." Dr. Haynes' research critically examines the concept of "soft" governance and its relation to and use of trust. In the largest African diaspora - Brazil - contemporary life is regulated through state-sanctioned practices of militarism, surveillance, and police terror. Here, trust presents itself as a historically fraught and racialized concept. Haynes explores not simply what trust is, but the labor that it performs in police units as well as in the favelas they serve. She shows the nuanced ways in which trust intersects with local ideas about race and gender, and serves as a mode of "good citizenship," which one can claim or exercise by demonstrating trust.