Pobreza e desigualdade

This research studied the inner experiences of 30 Brazilian women in their 40s and 50s, living in the city of Sao Paulo, with a university level of education, who identified themselves as having participated in the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This study probed the lived experiences of these women in various aspects of their lives, for example, physical, sexual, psychological, affective, and their inner mythologies about older women, aging, and this passage. Furthermore, this research probed whether the set of values, beliefs, and practices experienced in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s overweighed for them the social charge of negativity and prejudice concerning older women and menopause, that is, if these women presented forms of rupture or continuity in relation to the way society's cultural mythology relate to this period of a woman's life. For data analysis and the thematic method were used in a combined manner with a basic phenomenological attitude. The procedure involved individual interviews and workshops oriented by the Gestalt approach and the Personal Mythology perspective. In addition to the oral accounts of the participants, plastic and poetic experiments based on Gestalt art therapy were also utilized as ways for self-expression and the further elaboration of experiences. Results indicate that while countercultural values and practices were still pervasive in many areas of the participants' fives, for most of them their self-esteem and self-perception as women were imbued with the negative values and beliefs of Western societies' widespread cultural mythologies regarding older women and menopause. Most of them go through this passage misinformed and lonely, with feelings of loss, shame, and denial. However, the workshop experiences served as awareness-raising groups for these women, helping them to retrieve their countercultural values and experiences, and to start extending their scope to this area of their lives questioning the mores of the social milieu where their experiences occur. This outcome of the workshops' experience attests to the therapeutic relevance of women's groups in helping them deal with the conflicts and changes of this passage in life. The Gestalt therapy approach to group work enriched by the perspective of Personal Mythology proved to be of value in this process and suggests a very practical way of supporting women during this phase of their lives. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This project analyzes efforts to remake the relationship between water and city in São Paulo, Brazil. Currently experiencing overlapping problems of flooding, scarcity, and pollution, São Paulo illustrates the challenges of managing water in a contemporary mega-city. This dissertation subsequently considers the city’s water management through an approach that borrows from urban political ecology, social studies of science, and post-colonial urban theory. With an epistemological grounding in these literatures, this project analyzes ongoing conversations about water management in São Paulo, and focuses on how water is encountered and engaged with in the landscape by engineers, artists, and activists. This project touches on many aspects of the city’s waterscape, but its specific focus is on the management of stormwater and efforts to deal with flooding in the city, both historically as well as in the contemporary moment. By considering urban infrastructure not as a technical system for managing water but rather a deeply political intervention that ties together the social and natural landscapes of the city, this project offers a textured, critical look at the forms in which water is made legible through diverse processes of representation and engagement. Through an understanding of urbanization as a deeply political process of landscape change that folds together social and natural processes, this project argues for an approach to water management that takes seriously the relationships between inequality, infrastructure, and urban development in considering how water is governed. More specifically, it argues that the city’s water crisis is fundamentally a crisis of urban inequality and inadequate housing provisioning, which is coupled with a propensity towards large-scale, monofunctional infrastructures. São Paulo makes clear how urban inequality influences management, complicating efforts to implant necessary infrastructure and equitably distribute drinking water.

The primary analytical focus of this dissertation is to assess municipal (district) human development by using spatial analysis and spatial econometric techniques with the intent of guiding decision-making processes. The Human Development Index (HDI) from the United Nations Development Program is the main focus of this study, which relies on geographic information systems (GIS) technology to incorporate the spatial dimension in the HDI, and to provide the data platform for analyses. Methods of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and Confirmatory Spatial Data Analysis are used to accomplish the research objectives. The results of this dissertation suggest that the geographic environment plays an important role in the understanding of the relationship between human development and public intervention. In the case of Brazil, public sector involvement in enlarging people's social choices must explicitly consider relative location if the goal is to create equitable access to opportunities through strategic investment in education, health, and skills of the people. This enhanced, spatial perspective will enable a greater number of the population to participate in the growth process as well as to share its benefits, and further expand people's capabilities. From the regional inequality perspective, that characterizes Brazil, Southeast municipalities have a comparative advantage because of their higher level of development; as a consequence, these municipalities have a stronger capacity to manage social issues. In contrast, Northeast municipalities, because of their lower level of development, do not have such a strong capacity. From the intra-urban perspective, similar, diverse spatial dynamics can be observed in the districts of Sao Paulo municipality. This dissertation draws three main conclusions concerning the relationship between human development and public intervention. First, the tendency to allow an uncontrolled decentralization process, common in many developing countries, may need to be replaced with some coordination mechanisms. Second, if there is a willingness to implement ‘pro-equality’ policies, social policies should be spatially focused, instead of being applied universally across all municipalities. Third, a few spatial strategies are proposed as alternatives to implement ‘pro-equality’ policies. These strategies are based on the existence of spatial diffusion processes that take place in the study areas.

Breastfeeding offers significant benefits to the breastfed infant as well as the breastfeeding woman. The World Health Organization now recommends exclusive breastfeeding until six months, followed by supplementation and continued breastfeeding to two years or more. Around the world, public health programs endeavour to promote breastfeeding through educational programs. In Brazil, such programming is widespread, and yet less than 30% of women in São Paulo breastfeeding exclusively even to four months post-partum. This study uses a qualitative-quantitative bio-experiential approach to explore the way that stressful experiences and circumstances in the lives of low-income women from the Eastern Zone of São Paulo, Brazil, influence their decision to wean or supplement their infant before 12 weeks post-partum. Sixty-five first-time mothers participated in a 12-week longitudinal study of life stressors and breastfeeding practice. Participants were asked to complete one pre-partum and six post-partum interviews. Narrative and biological data were collected from each participant at each interview. Statistical analysis revealed that among these participants the breastfeeding hormone oxytocin did not mediate breastfeeding duration. Oxytocin appeared to act as a biomarker of stressful experience, while Epstein-Barr Virus antibody titre, a commonly used biological measure of psychosocial stress, did not. Unplanned pregnancy, older age and higher mean oxytocin level were statistically associated with weaned outcome at 12 weeks. Unplanned pregnancy, older age, higher mean oxytocin level, higher mean satisfaction score regarding financial situation and lower mean satisfaction score regarding interpersonal factors were associated with decreased duration of any breastfeeding. Unplanned pregnancy, older age and lower mean satisfaction score regarding interpersonal factors were associated with decreased duration of exclusive breastfeeding. Ethnographic analysis revealed that the effect of unplanned pregnancy may be connected to the discourse of the self-sacrificial, child-centric “good mother.” Exclusive breastfeeding was seen as a hallmark of this idealised maternal type. Single women with unplanned pregnancies expressed a great deal of ambivalence towards their own maternity and toward the somewhat unobtainable good mother ideal, especially with relation to the physical and psychological challenges breastfeeding. Women’s ambivalence appeared to influence their decisions to supplement or wean their infants by or before 12 weeks post-partum.

In this research project I address two main issues of meaning-making among Brazilian hip-hoppers: (1) the processes and technologies by which practitioners perform and produce hip-hop (design), and (2) the articulations hip-hoppers make between hip-hop and society (mediation). My analysis is based on over four years of fieldwork in São Paulo, Brazil. I argue that Brazilian hip-hop, as developed by shantytown youth, constructs arenas for citizenship debates, educational discussions, economic development, and practices of community through the narratives it performs, the ideologies and meanings it produces, and the networks it mobilizes. I describe these hip-hop developments and demonstrate how persons “work” hip-hop culture and articulate it to a Brazilian national formation that is challenged by global processes. I delineate how Brazilian hip-hop, while influenced by the United States' version of this cultural form, significantly differs from it. It has transformed the values of the U.S. urban variant and this rearrangement has differing social effects.

Sidewalk vendors occupy a peculiar place in contemporary urban landscapes. They are ubiquitous in many large cities of the world. Yet, they often maintain ambiguous positions in physical, cultural, political and socioeconomic spaces simultaneously. São Paulo, Brazil is no exception. My dissertation examines the ways camelôs, as vendors are often called in Brazil, navigate the material and symbolic spaces in which they operate. Focusing on the experiences, interactions, conversations and practices of a group of camelôs, the dissertation explores the relationship between work, identity, space and citizenship in contemporary São Paulo. I argue that the ambiguity engendered by camelôs' work practices and everyday experiences, in relation to various realms of social life, forces us to rethink the role of work in the formation of modern subjects and the obligations of the State in the contemporary world. The dissertation illustrates how vendors' economic practices reside at the interstices of categories like legality and illegality, public and private space, employment and unemployment. In contrast to traditional understandings of an "informal economy" then, I suggest that the work practices of unlicensed sidewalk vendors in Brazil, and elsewhere, may be better understood as constituting a set of interstitial work practices. The bulk of the dissertation explores how the liminal aspects of their work foster a constant uncertainty in vendors' everyday experiences, in spite of their relatively mundane labor routines. Descriptions of such routines provide the context to analyze the interactions camelôs have with each other, with pedestrian-clients, and with city agents—particularly police and tax collectors—and local governments who attempt to regulate their work. Contextualizing the research historically, the penultimate chapter sketches a genealogy of "interstitial work practices" in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities from colonial times through the 20th century. The dissertation concludes by elaborating the concept of interstitial work further by considering unlicensed sidewalk vending as an economic, spatial, social, cultural, aesthetic, political and historically situated work practice. Furthermore, the final analysis paves the way for re-thinking studies on the informal economy as well as recent research on cities and citizenship that take struggles around housing as their primary focus.

Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theories of language, hegemony and counter-hegemony; critical race theories; Erving Goffman’s frame analysis; and from extensive communication scholarship, this qualitative study examines resistance to state violence in Brazil through the use of media and language. It employs frame analysis and grounded theory to analyze public content produced by two grassroots groups from Sao Paulo. The study shows how two groups create media and develop alternative grammars to resist criminalization, dehumanization, and erasure, in order to challenge dominant notions of race, space, justice, violence, and citizenship. Constructing a form of radical media located within broader networks of activism, these groups challenge traditional understandings police brutality in the country. In reframing police killings from necessary tools of social order into genocidal attacks on communities of black and poor periféricos, activists and families place racial meanings and identity at the center of the problem, expose structural inequalities, connect broader social justice issues, and put forth an understanding of state violence as a historical and foundational issue of Brazil as a nation. Furthermore, they expose the far-reaching consequences of state-sponsored violence through a frame of disruption: the broken normalcy of life, mental illness, financial problems, family separation, and community fragmentation resulting from massacres and other cases of police killings. The texts examined in this thesis also suggest that the family members, primarily mothers, are not seeking to restore the relative normalcy that existed in their lives before violence struck them. Having gone through the experiences of violence, neglect, and impunity they conceive their work as one of changing the existing framework of social relations; altering society’s views on state violence, its contexts, mechanisms, and consequences; and contributing to create a deeper understanding of justice. Their media present a robust body of counter-knowledge and public memory of violence that preclude the cases to vanishing from the public realm and offer much needed alternative narratives that explain state violence from the ground; alternative narratives that overtime may help close the immense knowledge gap that exists among different segments of Brazilian society.

A tese aborda o processo de identificação das favelas e sua apropriação pelos movimentos de 'trabalhadores favelados'. Em A Invenção das Favelas (2005), Valladares discutiu as favelas como uma representação e invenção social do século XX. Partindo desse marco analítico compartilhado e discutido por outros autores, construímos uma escala de comparação entre Rio de Janeiro e Belo Horizonte. Na primeira parte da tese, compreendemos essa representação como o resultado de um processo identificação. Como observou Noriel, em L’Identification (2006), o Estado moderno foi um dos maiores produtores de tecnologias de identificação, dispositivos de poder que visam conhecer, classificar e governar as populações num dado território. Investigamos como as práticas estatais no Rio de Janeiro e em Belo Horizonte constituíram representações das favelas, delineando um discurso e um dispositivo de poder sobre os territórios da pobreza através de legislações, censos e comissões de estudo. As analogias, particularidades e trocas instituídas no processo de identificação são analisadas, observando a formação de uma retórica da marginalidade social no âmbito do Estado, reproduzindo estigmas sociais, mas também gerando oportunidades para reivindicação de direitos. Nesse sentido, na segunda parte da tese, analisamos os movimentos dos 'trabalhadores favelados', organizados pela União dos Trabalhadores Favelados (UTF) no Rio de Janeiro e Federação dos Trabalhadores Favelados de Belo Horizonte (FTFBH). Compreendemos a forma como esses movimentos sociais organizaram repertórios de ação, apropriando-se da identificação das favelas para reivindicar direitos, mobilizaram-se eleitoralmente, vinculando-se a grupos de esquerda, e propuseram projetos de reforma urbana.

O objeto de estudo deste trabalho trata-se do Turismo de Favela realizado nas comunidades pobres do Rio de Janeiro. O objetivo geral deste trabalho é o de descrever os seus mecanismos e compreender o alcance e os limites desta atividade econômica no contexto de uma reflexão sobre desenvolvimento sustentável em comunidades urbanas pobres. O Turismo de Favela, como sabemos, vem sendo praticado no Rio de Janeiro desde do início da década de 1990, tendo aumentado significativamente a sua demanda nos últimos cinco anos. Os roteiros oferecidos pelas agências de Turismo Receptivo são progressivamente mais invasivos sendo, praticamente, todos iguais. São visitados os becos e vielas das comunidades pobres com o objetivo de explorar um espetáculo de pobreza e violência. Muitos são os fatores que instigam o turista a procurar esse tipo de Turismo, principalmente o marketing feito pelas empresas de Turismo e veículos de comunicação de massa, sendo o mais importante deles, o filme Cidade de Deus. Como conclusão, discutimos algumas idéias para um Turismo menos preconceituoso nas comunidades pobres da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, tendo como premissa que para o sucesso desta atividade é necessário incorporar os moradores das comunidades visitadas.