Bio
Mariana Valente is an assistant professor at the University of St. Gallen Law School (Switzerland) and a director and board member of InternetLab, Brazil. She is a Brazilian lawyer and researcher on human rights and technologies. For the past 10 years, Mariana has been researching, writing, teaching and speaking publicly about gender inequalities in the digital environment, particularly online gender-based violence (OGBV) and related policies, legal strategies and law enforcement.
She is a co-author of The Body Is the Code: Legal Strategies for Fighting Revenge Porn in Brazil (in Portuguese), which influenced local policy change regarding non-consensual intimate images. Recently, she has been dedicating herself to the issue of online misogyny and gender-based political violence by coordinating the InternetLab branch of an International Development Research Centre-funded project in partnership with IT for Change (India). She discussed some of the results recently in the paper “No Place for Women: Gaps and Challenges in Promoting Equality on Social Media” (a chapter in the book Constitutionalizing Social Media, Bloomsbury, 2022) and is currently finishing a book about the last decade in policy change on OGBV in Brazil. In 2022, she was part of the Brazilian Senate legal experts commission for drafting an artificial intelligence bill for Brazil.