Sociologia

Resultado de uma pesquisa mais ampla que foi realizada no Setor de Cirurgias Reparadoras e Estética, obra social sobre a responsabilidade do doutor Ivo Pitanguy na Santa Casa de Misericórdia, situada na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A pesquisa tem como objetivo refletir sobre a representação da imagem e os significados que as classes populares fazem do corpo e da beleza.

Descreve a visita da socióloga francesa a Brasília e à Universidade de Brasília.

This essay examines the urban atmospheres of terror in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from the perspective of women residents. Drawing on two ethnographic projects conducted in various favelas in 2016 and 2019, I argue that terror, as an urban atmosphere, is deeply rooted in a long history of racialized and gendered violence, and that its persistence in the contemporary urban landscape is a consequence of the coloniality of power. The analysis begins by exploring the layers, textures, and complexities of urban atmospheres of terror, providing a deeper understanding of their racialized and gendered nature. It further examines the transformative power of the body in reshaping these urban atmospheres, focusing on how favela women cultivate alternative affective atmospheres within their communities. Drawing on Afrodiasporic and decolonial feminist thinking, I show how Afrodescendant women in the favelas resist and transform these atmospheres, creating spaces that challenge the coloniality of power and its spatial manifestations, such as urban borders. I conclude that a key aspect of favela women's urban politics and resistance to coloniality is rooted in the body and the affective dimensions of urban life.

This article examines the mobilisation of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping informal settlements. It argues that digital mapping operates politically through a re-configuration of circulation, power, and territorial formations. Drawing on Stuart Elden’s understanding of territory, where space is ‘rendered’ as a political category, the coming together of digital mapping and the geoweb is uncovered as a political technique re-making territory through computational logics – operating as a calculative practice that, beyond simply representing space, is productive of the political spatiality that characterises territory. The article is based on an analysis of recent attempts by ICT corporates, particularly Google, to map favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, critically examining the claim that digitally mapping informal settlements is a mechanism for socio-economic inclusion. Providing a counterargument to claims around the power of digital maps to incorporate favelas, provide recognition, legitimacy, visibility and citizenship, we discuss how in the interface between digital and urban worlds, territory as a political space is constructed through economic incorporation. In doing so, the article unpacks the spatial politics of digital and smart urbanisms and the emerging sovereignties of digital territories, particularly in the context of the tension between inclusion and exclusion experienced by those who live in informal settlements in cities in the global South.

 It is often argued that various forms of illegality persist in the Brazilian Amazon because of weak frontier governance. However, very little is understood about how this governance can be strengthened in the context of social and spatial change in a way that will counter illegality. Drawing on the concept of heterotopias, as discussed by Michel Foucault, and the life history of an illegal logger in an agrarian reform settlement project in the state of Pará, this paper approaches frontier governance by conceptualising the ‘settlement heterotopia’ as a real, lived-in place in which the space that makes up various state and nonstate actors’ sites of action interact and continually rearrange power relations. This rearrangement process may or may not work to legitimise illegality and, therefore, strengthening frontier governance involves a process by which collaborative power relations emerge and residents decide to work with the state instead of alongside illegality.

The occupation of space is a key geographic tactic for social movements. In this article, we explore how movements’ explicit and everyday occupation of space exists along a continuum. Taken together, these occupations can function as part of a broader strategy of creating dialogic spaces for environmental knowledge production. Dialogic spaces have an educational function, and are intended to provoke critical dialogue and transformation within society. Drawing upon a political ecology of education framework, we show that these dialogic spaces are strategically occupied to help transform both material and immaterial territories. We evidence this argument by analyzing the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) Jornada de Agroecology (agroecological journey), which is a social movement meeting. Drawing upon data collected at the 2012 Jornada, we argue that the Jornada’s disparate spatial forms are part of a broader journey related to transforming not only space, but also what constitutes agroecology.

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city’s informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states.

The association between logistics and militarised humanitarianism is expanding as a strategy for managing migrants' productive and reproductive lives. In Brazil, despite a progressive humanitarian visa policy, the national army remains responsible for the logistics of a severely underfunded humanitarian operation in Brazil’s Amazon. This study, based on participatory action research with 300 migrants, introduces the notion of martialisation to show political and socioeconomic dimensions that are juxtaposed in the military logistics of humanitarian zones and subsequently experienced as a dominant structuring process of exploitation. These are securitization of migration linked to at once the deepening of market liberalism and the normalisation of military intervention within productive and reproductive processes. Findings show that the military leadership in Brazil’s humanitarian response reveals a multi-scalar phenomenon of military rule that contributes to sustaining the repressive labour regime in Brazil’s Amazon. It articulates the structures of labour subordination with the micromanagement of reproductive measures by which migrants are controlled, exploited, and dispossessed of their rights. The conclusion makes the case for the collective organization of migrants in pursuit of transformative action.

This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region’s spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the ‘South’ re-elaborating and putting into practice notions arising from ‘international’ literature, such as that of ‘active geography’, and pioneering critical uses of instruments, such as mappings and statistics, that have often been associated with technocracy and political conservatism. Connected with peasants’ struggles and with a theoretical framework that is cognisant of the colonial histories and insurgent Black and indigenous traditions in the Northeast, these geographers’ works show that there is no ‘Southern Theory’ without a concrete engagement of scholars with social and political problems, one which is not limited to ‘participation’, but aims at challenging the political powers in place. Although not devoid of contradictions that are analysed here, the experiences of these Southern geographers acting in and for the South can provide precious insights into current (Northern or Southern) scholarly programmes aimed at resisting oppression.