Politics of the Periphery in Urban Latin America: Reconceptualising Politics from the Margins in Recife, Brazil.
In my PhD project, I explore the relationships between residents of low-income neighbourhoods and the state around issues of housing and urban restructuring in Recife, Brazil. State-led housing interventions, known as slum upgrading projects, invoke a sense of belonging to the ‘formal city’ and create a sentiment of being taken care of by the state among targeted residents. At the same time these residents express dissatisfactions and grievances as the new infrastructures do provide solutions to their daily predicament and fail to meet their expectations. Ethnographically tracing these ambivalent negotiations of state-led housing interventions, I investigate the concrete, situated and affective reality of the state, foregrounding residents’ perspectives.
This project is part of the comparative research project Politics of the Periphery in Urban Latin America: Reconceptualising Politics from the Margins (POPULAR), which aims to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the relationships of residents of low-income neighbourhoods and the state from the vantage point of the former.