The Invention of the Favela

The Invention of the Favela PDF Author: Licia do Prado Valladares
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469649993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
For the first time available in English, Licia do Prado Valladares's classic anthropological study of Brazil's vast, densely populated urban living environments reveals how the idea of the favela became an internationally established—and even attractive and exotic—representation of poverty. The study traces how the term "favela" emerged as an analytic category beginning in the mid-1960s, showing how it became the object of immense popular debate and sustained social science research. But the concept of the favela so favored by social scientists is not, Valladares argues, a straightforward reflection of its social reality, and it often obscures more than it reveals. The established representation of favelas undercuts more complex, accurate, and historicized explanations of Brazilian development. It marks and perpetuates favelas as zones of exception rather than as integral to Brazil's modernization over the past century. And it has had important repercussions for the direction of research and policy affecting the lives of millions of Brazilians. Valladares's foundational book will be welcomed by all who seek to understand Brazil's evolution into the twenty-first century.

The Invention of the Favela

The Invention of the Favela PDF Author: Licia do Prado Valladares
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469649993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
For the first time available in English, Licia do Prado Valladares's classic anthropological study of Brazil's vast, densely populated urban living environments reveals how the idea of the favela became an internationally established—and even attractive and exotic—representation of poverty. The study traces how the term "favela" emerged as an analytic category beginning in the mid-1960s, showing how it became the object of immense popular debate and sustained social science research. But the concept of the favela so favored by social scientists is not, Valladares argues, a straightforward reflection of its social reality, and it often obscures more than it reveals. The established representation of favelas undercuts more complex, accurate, and historicized explanations of Brazilian development. It marks and perpetuates favelas as zones of exception rather than as integral to Brazil's modernization over the past century. And it has had important repercussions for the direction of research and policy affecting the lives of millions of Brazilians. Valladares's foundational book will be welcomed by all who seek to understand Brazil's evolution into the twenty-first century.

Slums

Slums PDF Author: Alan Mayne
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and a billion of these urban dwellers reside in neighborhoods of entrenched disadvantage—neighborhoods that are characterized as slums. Slums are often seen as a debilitating and even subversive presence within society. In reality, though, it is public policies that are often at fault, not the people who live in these neighborhoods. In this comprehensive global history, Alan Mayne explores the evolution and meaning of the word “slum,” from its origins in London in the early nineteenth century to its use as a slur against the favela communities in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics in 2016. Mayne shows how the word slum has been extensively used for two hundred years to condemn and disparage poor communities, with the result that these agendas are now indivisible from the word’s essence. He probes beyond the stereotypes of deviance, social disorganization, inertia, and degraded environments to explore the spatial coherence, collective sense of community, and effective social organization of poor and marginalized neighborhoods over the last two centuries. In mounting a case for the word’s elimination from the language of progressive urban social reform, Slums is a must-read book for all those interested in social history and the importance of the world’s vibrant and vital neighborhoods.

Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums PDF Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 1844671607
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

Technology of the Oppressed

Technology of the Oppressed PDF Author: David Nemer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543346
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
How Brazilian favela residents engage with and appropriate technologies, both to fight the oppression in their lives and to represent themselves in the world. Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

Favela Media Activism

Favela Media Activism PDF Author: Leonardo Custódio
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498530001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
What explains the engagement of low-income young people in media initiatives for political mobilization and social change in everyday life? Favela Media Activism: Counterpublics for Human Rights in Brazil responds to this question using an in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary study about the trajectories in media activism among young residents of low-income and violence-ridden favelas in socially unequal Rio de Janeiro. Leonardo Custódio provides multifaceted analyses of how favela youth engage in individual and collective media activist initiatives despite social class constraints and neoliberal imperatives in their everyday life. This book details processes experienced by young favela residents while becoming individuals who act to challenge and change patterns of discrimination, governmental neglect and drug-related violence. It is an important resource for scholars interested in the nuances of political engagement among marginalized youth in today’s world of hyper-connectivity, information abundance, and the persistence of racial and social inequalities.

Drugs & Democracy in Rio de Janeiro

Drugs & Democracy in Rio de Janeiro PDF Author: Enrique Desmond Arias
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807830607
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Taking an ethnographic approach to understanding urban violence, Enrique Desmond Arias examines the ongoing problems of crime and police corruption that have led to widespread misery and human rights violations in many of Latin America's new democracies.

Good Trouble

Good Trouble PDF Author: Brian Wolf
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498563457
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book is written in praise of the criminal; a unique kind of criminal, who is motivated not by personal gain, but ethical altruism. Deviant heroes are those individuals who violate unjust norms and laws, facing the repercussions of social control, effecting positive social change in the process. Using a method that examines how the biographies of individual deviants intersected with history, it probes how criminals and deviants have been on the leading edge of important, positive social changes and the creation of a more just, fair, and humane society. Brian Wolf concludes with an examination of the problem of conformity and how deviant heroism in everyday life may be a remedy for injustice in micro-level social contexts.

Nemesis

Nemesis PDF Author: Misha Glenny
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1770893865
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
An explosive vision of contemporary Brazil’s underbelly by one of our greatest investigative reporters. This is a book about a man known as Nem; about Rocinha, the slum or “favela” he grew up in and came to run as a private fiefdom; about Rio, the beautiful but damned city that Rocinha exists in; and about the battle for Brazil. Nemesis pans in and out from the arc of Nem’s individual, astonishing trajectory to the wider story of the country that he exists in. It’s about drugs and gangs and violence and poverty. It’s about a man who made a terribly dangerous and life-altering decision for the best and most understandable of reasons. And it’s about the wider forces at work in a country that is in the world’s spotlight as never before and is set to stay there. Those forces include the evangelical church, bent police and straight police, drug lords, farmers, TV magnates, crusading politicians, and corrupt politicians. And what they are engaged in is nothing less than the battle for Brazil’s soul.

Favela

Favela PDF Author: Janice Perlman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199709556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life. Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that has resulted. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. Foreign Affairs praises Perlman for writing "with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis."

Favela Tours

Favela Tours PDF Author: Thomas Apchain
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1786307677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
For a long time, favelas were a source of fear for tourists visiting Rio de Janeiro. Now that they are more appealing, some have become popular tourist destinations even though they are still regarded as an "off the beaten track" activity. Favela Tours analyzes the factors behind the emergence of tourism in the favelas, places of otherness and authenticity for visitors who come mainly from Western Europe and North America. Based on ethnography of those involved in these practices (guides, residents and tourists), this book describes how the local and global forces are converging to make favelas part of the western tourism system: a mechanism for fabricating and assimilating otherness.