Pobreza e desigualdade

This dissertation examines the changing relationship between the state and society, and the construction of gendered citizenship in São Paulo since the early 1980s, using the case of women's police stations (run by policewomen to investigate crimes committed against women). I reconstruct theories on the state and gender, as produced, among others, by Sonia Alvarez, Nancy Fraser, and Georgina Waylen, explicating how the (trans)formation of state agents' and social actors' interests matters for the construction of women's rights. Based on interview and participant observation research, I argue that the state is a multifaceted and internally contradictory actor. Although state agents have their own interests, their relationship with civil society actors can change. The interests of both are reciprocally reconstructed depending on interactions at the level of daily work experience, the strength of social movements, and the political context. First created in 1985 in a context of democratization and in response to feminist critique of sexism in regular police stations (mostly male), women's police stations constitute a site within the state where policewomen, feminists, and clients engage in struggles over the meaning of violence against women as a crime. Since the early 1980s, a gender perspective (male-versus-female) has emerged as hegemonic within women's movements, privileging gender violence (e.g., conjugal violence) over forms of violence constructed by counter-hegemonic feminist discourses (e.g., racial violence, homophobia). While policewomen both legitimize and undermine the hegemonic feminist discourse, battered women begin to articulate a distinct gender identity and women's rights discourse when pressing charges. The case of women's police stations shows that while state and society can engender each other even within the same political context, both policewomen and feminists construct a contradictory gendered citizenship whereby certain women (e.g., wives) have access to justice, whereas others (e.g., black women, lesbians) do not. This leads to a core thesis: the state and social movements are actors and sites of discursive and power struggles over the construction of social categories within which different groups may (or may not) claim rights. To be more inclusive, gendered citizenship must rest on a broad construction of women's interests

This study analyzes the problem of police violence in Brazil and Argentina, observing how it affects the relationship between poor communities and the state. The conclusions are based on field research in two shantytowns: Villa 31 de Retiro in Buenos Aires and Heliópolis in São Paulo, comparing their experiences with police violence and political participation. The study describes how political organizations, neighborhood associations, and civil groups responded to the continuities of repressive policing strategies in poor areas of both cities. It analyzes the participatory channels opened in São Paulo and Buenos Aires and the advances and setbacks in protecting vulnerable communities from violence. The main argument in this thesis is that the measures taken by governments to increase participation in São Paulo and Buenos Aires failed to protect citizens in the poor neighborhoods analyzed, as states established contradicting relationships with these communities, at times through repression and violence, and at times through clientelism and particularism. The thesis concludes that in order to successfully promote citizen security and reduce state violence in poor neighborhoods, more effective channels of community participation need to be established, leveraging local demands within the decision-making process in public security.

This dissertation examines an innovative and systemic school reform effort launched by Paulo Freire during his tenure as Municipal Secretary of Education for the city of Sao Paulo. The overarching goals of this reform were the democratization of access to schooling, the transformation of classrooms and school sites into democratic centers for the problematization, celebration, and transformation of popular knowledge, and the creation of critical and participatory citizens. This research explores the implementation process that was designed to facilitate this ambitious reform. The analysis concentrates on the various institutional mechanisms created to support teachers' efforts in learning the necessary skills to realize the reform's objectives and assesses their overall effectiveness as policy implementation tools. Data from school site observations, interviews, and teacher surveys gathered from August 1992 until December 1992 inform this study. The major findings emphasize the importance of a professional learning process that (1) facilitates the creation of supportive but reflective learning communities; (2) departs from the realities of the educators; (3) includes opportunities to experience and observe "best" practices; and (4) provides coherence among all levels of reform policies.

Due to increased urbanization in the global south during the later half of the 20th century, a severe lack of suitable housing and related infrastructure in low-income communities has developed. In order to address housing deficit issues, particularly in large metropolitan areas, national and local governments have implemented various policies and programs intended to improve housing conditions of residents living in poverty-stricken communities. To determine what types of programs provide housing for low-income residents, this thesis will examine select housing programs implemented in the South American cities of Caracas, Venezuela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and São Paulo. Brazil from the 1990s through the early 21st century. This study will provide an overview of urban housing in Latin America during the 20th century, including housing policies that contributed to the growth of housing settlements for low-income residents. The impact of the proliferation of low-income housing in urban areas will be discussed. This study will then present a narrative on select urban housing improvement and upgrading programs implemented in the low-income neighborhoods in the study cities. Data and other pertinent information regarding these initiatives were obtained from urban housing policy reports and briefs and program evaluations. The overarching goal of this assessment is to establish if programmatic outcomes were successful and to examine the impacts of such programs in the social and economic realms.

Limitations to representations for spatiotemporal data and query languages are well documented in the geographic information systems (GIS) literature. The primary purpose of this study is to develop a method for measuring similarity of change among discrete areal objects and to extend current approaches for representing change in GIS. This research identifies the primary elements necessary for formalizing spatial change query language operators and develops a method for assessing the similarity of spatial change in the context of crime analysis. There are four main goals of this work. First, it is shown that similarity queries require semantics associated with three fundamental elements of this phenomenon: rate, magnitude, and direction of change. Second, based on the fundamental elements derived, a formal description of all possible relations among a target and referent with regard to similarity of change is presented. This formal description demonstrates a set of five basic similarity operators that represent ideal types of possible kinds of similarity of change relationships. A mathematical method based on the fundamental elements is presented by which similarity values can be derived. The usefulness of this model is then demonstrated through a case study of crime in São Paulo, Brazil. Third, the similarity measure is compared to the Structured Query Language (SQL) and Change Description Language (CDL) in order to determine if it is more expressive for reasoning about change among objects. Assessment has shown that it has advantages over these other query languages in efficiency and expressiveness. Fourth, to determine if the similarity query language is effective in practice, its expressiveness is evaluated in regard to requirements of the crime analysis domain. It was determined from this evaluation that the five basic similarity operators that form the basis of the language capture the semantics required for queries of spillover effects in crime data. It is also determined that the resolution of temporal intervals used has a measurable effect on the consistency of query results. The result of these activities has provided a formal model for reasoning about change using the concept of similarity tested in the context of crime applications.

This is a study of the role of the wage and labor policies in the determination of the wages of manufacturing workers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, under the military governments from 1964 to 1978. It is motivated by the worsening of the position of urban workers in the income distribution between 1960 and 1970. Chapter I presents the political and economic events of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as an historical background to the period. Chapter II analyzes the Brazilian industrial relations structure and focuses on issues relevant to wage determination, including the state-sponsored system of unions, the effective prohibition on strikes, the absence of a job security system, the interaction between the individual and collective labor contracts, and forced turnover rotatividade policies by the employers. Chapter III discusses the government's collective wage adjustment and minimum wage policies in the context of the inflationary economic environment, the Brazilian indexation system, and wage indexation systems in the Western industrial countries. It considers the impact on wages of technical aspects in the construction of a wage indexation system, including the choice of data and the manipulation of price indexes, and also the practical problems of empirical research in an inflationary economic environment. Chapter IV reviews the literature on income distribution, wage determination, and wage policy in Brazil, focusing on the use of information from the wage policies as "proxies," "benchmarks," and explanatory variables in the analysis of wage movements. Chapter V is an empirical study of long-run wage drift and changes in wage differentials in Sao Paulo manufacturing by industry, size of firm, and Brazilian versus multinational firms. Chapter VI measures the short-run impact elasticity of the two wage policies on wage changes using a monthly-data regression model. It is concluded the wage policies had limited impact on workers' wages relative to market forces after the 1965-1967 "wage squeeze" period because of the low real value of the minimum wage and the active labor markets as evidenced by high rates of job changing in the case of the collective wage adjustment. It is believed, however, that the set of labor and wage policies together contributed to the decline in wages and worsening of income distribution and set the stage for the continued worsening after the mid-1960s through unrestrained market activity.

The phenomenon of children living in the streets--street children--is international and has led to the development of an occupation known by several terms: street youthwork, detached youthwork, street social education or street education (in Latin American Portuguese/Spanish terminology, "educacao de rua"/"educacion de calle," or "educacion social de rua/educacion social de calle"). Street social educators have an impact on street children's lives and on the communities from whence they come. Their potential for basic street level group and neighborhood organizing has been shown in Brazil. Street youthwork represents an emergent occupation oriented to working with the poor in their own self-interest on issues related to their everyday lives on the street and towards their possibilities for economic mobility. This first study on the emergence of street social education in Sao Paulo, Brazil examines street youthworkers' everyday practices, and includes street youthworkers' background, beliefs, knowledge and skills; i.e., how they do street work. Given the magnitude of the international problem of street youth, street youthwork is a critical partial response. This descriptive, qualitative study on the nature and realities of street youthwork is based in Brazilian history and on semi-structured interviews with Brazilian youthworkers, children and other adults; examination of personal documents and public data; and participant observation. Brazilian street youthwork is a dynamic, phenomenologically and politically oriented pedagogy, and as such, offers a direct challenge to dominant philosophies and practices in formal and non-formal education with street youth. The findings are of interest to those in youth development, youth services, youthwork, child/youth care and child/youth policy. 

This dissertation tests three causal models of lynch mob violence in an effort to better understand the social forces that lead to the rise and decline of this behavior. Specifically, I conduct a national case study of lynching in Brazil and focus upon three structural causal models of Latin American lynch mob violence: lynching as a result of economic frustration, lynching as a response to threats by the "dangerous classes" (racial groups, interstate immigrants, and the landless); and lynching as a form of "street justice." Using occurrence data systematically gathered by the University of São Paulo's Center for the Study of Violence (USP/NEV) on lynching in the state of São Paulo for the last two decades of the twentieth century, I use time series regression analysis to compare and test these explanations. Additionally, I make use of cases studies in order to further understand the nature of Brazilian lynchings on a micro-level. All evidence taken together, the analyses suggest that lynching in Brazil is best characterized as street justice---a collective violent action by community members against alleged criminals or deviants under social circumstances where crime is epidemic and police-citizen relations are tenuous due to police corruption, violence against citizens, sweeps of poorer neighborhoods, a war-on-crime ideology, and police vigilantism-for-pay during the transition to democracy. In this setting, lynching is primarily reactive in nature, constrained by the availability of suspects apprehended by the mobs without regard to race or class. In the final chapter I use the comparative method to juxtapose lynching in contemporary São Paulo (1980 to 2000) with lynching in the Postbellum U.S. South (1880-1930). This analysis reveals two necessary components for a society to be prone to large-scale use of lynching. First, for lynching to occur on a large scale, hegemony ideology in the society must depict certain groups as threats worthy of violence---blacks in the Postbellum U.S. South and a "criminal class" in contemporary São Paulo. Second, hegemony must characterize the law as lacking legitimacy in regards to these threat groups.

This study investigates the role non-formal education (i.e., vocational training) plays in increasing the probabilities of upward socio-occupational mobility of the Brazilian workforce. The field research was conducted in 60 firms in the two largest urban centers of Brazil--Greater Sao Paulo and Greater Rio de Janerio--from February to August of 1978. The firms were selected from those branches and sectors of economic activity which most frequently use training courses of the National Services for Industrial, and Commercial, Apprenticeship known respectively as SENAI and SENAC. The sample includes 15 textile industries, 15 mechanical industries, 15 sales businesses and 15 hotels. From each of the 60 firms, 12 employees were selected (totaling 720 employees) regardless of personal or professional characteristics. Two types of questionnaires were administered: one to the employees (labor supply); one to each of the 60 employers (labor demand). The main observations derived from the field research are as follows: (a) The non-formal educational system rather than being a second alternative for those who do not have access to the formal system of schooling constitutes a second strong social mobility barrier, with its own explicit and implicit selection criteria. (b) Firms establish criteria to select potential candidates for vacancies or promotions. Among these criteria, education--latu sensu--does not rank high, and non-formal education is among the least important. The significant criteria are: sex, race, age, level of formal schooling, previous professional experience and references, recommendations from direct supervisors, "good" personality traits (docility, obedience, assiduousness, respect for authority, personal appearance, relationship with co-workers and supervisors), productivity, etc. (c) Firms make limited use of existing fiscal incentives for labor training under existing laws, partly because they were unaware of these incentives and partly because bureaucratic and administrative costs severly limit the access of smaller firms. (d) Less than half of the employees in the sample had had any vocational training. Thirty-two (out of 720) had been promoted because of courses taken. (e) The study also includes an analysis of the major shortcomings that both employers and employees report in their experience with vocational training institutions. (f) The data from this sample suggests that firms may benefit more from vocational training investments than do workers. To the extent workers' skills are upgraded this may translate into increases in productivity on the job. But workers' wage increases seem sharply limited.