Between decoloniality and borders, positionalities and scales in urban space: geographical considerations from the murder of a homeless person in a brazilian city

Abstract

The murder of a homeless person triggered this geographic consideration. What could be understood as a recurrent scene of urban violence in Brazil conveys a series of spatiotemporal meanings, practices, behaviors and gestures around socio-spatial relations. When thinking about Latin America it is known that, even with the processes of independence and the formal end of colonialism, coloniality and everything associated with it did not disappear. Urban space is a privileged site for thinking about power relations and a varied sort of devices that take shape in public, private and institutional spaces are reproduced in it. In this sense, issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, territorial origin, cultural background and immigration-related stigmas, need to be understood within a geopolitical, positional and relational framework in a non-hierarchical way, from local to global scale. Given the complexity that comprises the emergence of homeless people, this paper aims to understand their daily life confrontations and the risks of its exclusion or violent eradication. In doing this we ponder about the problem of the positionality of the roles of geographer, researcher, citizen and activist in the search for socio-spatial justice. Such questions are involved in a set of trajectories and positionalities, which appear in the form of annunciations, denunciations and tensions that we hope to present and discuss with the aim of offering alternatives for the geographic practice itself.