Lucas Sena
Dr. Lucas Sena is a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP), which included a visiting research fellowship at U of T's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). He also holds a Master of Laws, and Bachelor's degrees in both Law (LL.B.) and Political Science, all from the University of Brasília (UnB).
Dr. Sena's research is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of Law and Public Policy and Law and Development. His research follows two distinct but interconnected paths.
The first path, which is the focus of his current postdoctoral project, investigates governance, accountability, and anti-corruption. His project, "Administrative reforms and institutional multiplicity: multilevel efforts to combat corruption," analyzes Brazil's anti-corruption framework by mapping the ecosystem of federal and state control institutions, such as the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU). He seeks to build an original contribution by connecting this institutional mapping with the theoretical debate on social accountability, analyzing how state-led mechanisms and citizen-led efforts interact to shape public policy on transparency and probity.
The second path continues his doctoral research on race, institutional change, and equality, in which he examines the dynamics of institutional change in response to social demands for racial justice in Brazil. His doctoral dissertation, ‘Race, institutional change and public policy: the approval of quotas at USP’, used a discursive and historical institutionalist framework to analyze the adoption of affirmative action policies in higher education.
Across both research paths, Dr. Sena employs theoretical frameworks from political science and socio-legal studies to analyze how the polity and policies mutually shape one another. His broader interests include decolonial theory and the regulation of diversity.
Email: lucas.sena@utoronto.ca