Favela Residents Research Articles

Criminal Governance and Social Mobilization in Brazilian Favelas

This article examines the dynamics of crime governance and social mobilization in Brazil’s impoverished communities to answer why residents of favelas mobilize against state interventions while seemingly accepting the rule of organized criminal groups (OCGs). Previous studies have primarily explored the materialistic hypothesis or the role of coercion and fear in shaping community behavior. This article employs the tools provided by the literature on contentious politics and a qualitative meta-analysis to systematically assess the varied ways in which OCGs interact with the state and favela residents, mapping the heterogeneous effects produced as a result. The findings suggest that in favelas where criminal organizations are perceived as benign, residents may rely on them to fulfill basic needs, while the state is seen as an outsider that brings disruption of routines and violence. In favelas where criminal organizations are malign, there are few incentives for change as the outcomes of challenging OCGs are uncertain.

The Arts and Individual and Collective Agency: A Brazilian Favela Case Study

Brazil’s favela residents have long challenged the dominant media and social narrative that has, for decades, described them via discourses of criminality. This article examines the work of Redes da Maré, a civil society organization that offers cultural spaces and services for community-based creation and diffusion of the arts in its namesake favela. We employ the concepts of the social imaginary as well as individual and collective agency to investigate whether and in what ways a service-providing civil society organization that has adopted a cultural development approach encourages participants’ democratic attitudes and behaviors at the organizational and community level to challenge existing systemic social oppression by fostering participation in the development process and offering a platform for the expression of the voices of those it engages. Our analysis is based in part on interviews with 4 lead organizers and participants in Redes’ Free Dance School of Maré. Our analysis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the roles the arts can play in encouraging democratic agency and possibility among favela citizens despite adverse political and social conditions exacerbated by neoliberal beliefs and policies.

Developing critical thinking skills through gamification

Misinformation as well as the proliferation of fake news has been a problem during COVID-19 pandemic. This has affected many vulnerable communities in Brazil. The ability to understand and sort out pieces of reliable information and fake news has become a fundamental cognitive skill. In this study we report on the development of a serious game (a card-based role-playing game) using Brazilian folk heroes aimed to develop critical thinking skills to empower vulnerable communities affected by misinformation and fake news. Four groups located in the city of Goiânia (Brazil) participated in this research: one group of people experiencing homelessness; two groups of favela residents (one urban and one in the suburbs) and one group of recyclable material collectors from a cooperative. We gained entry and built trust with each of these groups and worked together for 10 months during the pandemic. We conducted participatory observations, individual interviews with each participant and discussed their daily interaction with information, specifically in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. The analyses of the observations and interview data gave us a glimpse of the communicative needs of the groups. Inserting players into a narrative where they can make decisions based on critical thinking and their own reflections on the pandemic was important for building knowledge and developing critical thinking in these communities. The nature of the game (interactive and cooperative) allowed participants to focus on problem-solving skills and group work. It encouraged them to use real-life knowledge and skills to solve the fictional problems presented by the narrative.

Care-based community communication, capacity, and agency during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the Complexo da Maré Favela, Brazil

Scholars and officials have argued that the strengthening of communities and community-led development constitute an important policy goal in the fight against emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, most strategies to address such crises fail to consider the significance of community-driven solutions, community-level knowledge, and actors. At the same time, researchers have recognized that communication, such as through local newspapers, promotes community development by increasing communities’ social capital and cohesion. But the role of community communication in the encouragement and exercise of other levels of agency and in the development of community capacity, including to address emergencies, remains underexplored. This article investigates whether and how community journalists in a Rio de Janeiro favela have expressed and sought to develop favela residents’ individual and collective agency during the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by analyzing thematically the COVID-19 virus-related articles that appeared in a community-based newspaper, Maré Online, between March and September 2020. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with Maré Online reporters to augment our analysis and supplemented that data with participant observation of relevant virtual community-led organizing meetings and events. Our study shows how community-based journalists revealed and promoted individual and collective agency through what we term a “care-based, participatory solutions journalism,” which supported favela residents’ “communicative freedom” as conceptualized by Benhabib (2013). This analysis stresses the connection between communicative freedom and community capacity. It illustrates the importance of community-produced communication in development of and in community, especially when those populations are pejoratively framed in the media, public policy, and often also, research.

Rights and Stones: Pentecostal Autoconstruction and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro

This article discusses the growth of Pentecostal churches in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author pleads for a systemic inclusion of religious ideas and practices in theoretical reflections on citizenship in the urban contexts of Brazil. Concretely, scholars need to include the explosive rise of Pentecostalism in their reflections on insurgent citizenship this religious movement fuels rights discourses and supports feelings of pride and dignity in the face of structural spatial exclusion. The author highlights two important relations between favela building practices and Pentecostalism. One concerns the affinity between the bottom-up organizational and doctrinal structure of the biggest Pentecostal denomination in Brazil (the Assemblies of God) and the informal building practices of favela residents. The other concerns the elective affinity between autoconstruction in terms of Pentecostal projects of self-fashioning and self-governance and autoconstruction in terms of favela building practices.

Digital rockets: Resisting necropolitics through defiant languaging and artivism

This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and ‘artivism’ as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.

Vulnerability, neglect, and collectivity in Brazilian favelas: Surviving the threats of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state's necropolitics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened existing inequities and injustices in Brazil, seen in the disproportionately detrimental impacts on favelas. State policy responses to the pandemic have disregarded favela residents' experiences. Recommendations such as 'shelter-in-place' ignore the reality of over 11.4 million favela residents who cannot work from home or afford to stop working, nor practise physical distancing from others. This study investigates the discourse of community organisations in favelas as they respond to the threats of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state's necropolitics. Community organisations in favelas have taken action to protect their residents from the virus, unemployment and hunger. I assess organisations' (1) justification to act as a collective in their communities, and (2) stances about the government's responses to the crisis. Through content analysis of social media, websites and media appearances of eight favela organisations and collectives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, this study finds three main themes through which organisations justify their actions: vulnerability, neglect, and collectivity and care. More than survival strategies, the actions of favela organisations are counter-political acts as they oppose the decrepit necropolitics of the state by collectively enduring in the Brazilian context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding favela organisations' actions in response to the pandemic is fundamental. It further illuminates the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of informal settlements' residents and the governance of public health emergencies in these communities.

The challenge of decolonizing knowledge: the Marielle Franco Favela Dictionary.

Dominant social groups describe favelas based on negative stereotypes, which are increasingly being challenged by various collective actors. Originating from a collaborative effort carried out by academics and favela residents, the Marielle Franco Favela Dictionary is an online platform that aims to spread alternative narratives regarding these territories and their populations through collective knowledge building. This article discusses the common ground and points of contention regarding the different forms of knowledge held by academics, activists, and favela residents. Furthermore, we reconstruct the trajectory of the Dictionary’s creation, and in so doing overcome certain tensions and incorporate other languages and registers able to support the production of memory in favelas.

Municípios in the Time of Covid-19 in Brazil: Socioeconomic Vulnerabilities, Transmission Factors and Public Policies.

This paper aims at identifying the Covid-19 infection and mortality risk factors in Brazil during the pandemic’s first wave. Three groups of variables are considered: socioeconomic and health vulnerabilities, factors related to the virus transmission channels (mobility and density) and the effects of the policy responses. The analysis at the level of all 5,570 municipalities, drawing on a matching of different statistical and administrative databases, returns three main results. First, structurally vulnerable populations are hardest hit—non-white, poor, in poor health, favela residents and informal workers—showing the impact of socioeconomic inequalities. Second, we highlight some policy repercussions. The Auxilio Emergencial (emergency cash transfer) has had a mitigating effect in communities with relatively more informal workers. Finally, Covid-19 has hit hardest in municipalities that are more pro-Bolsonaro. The president's rhetoric and attitudes may have prompted his supporters to adopt more risky behaviour, suffer the consequences and infect others.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41287-021-00487-w.

From ‘pacification’ to ‘licence-to-kill’: Favela residents’ experience with the UPP from 2011-2018

This article draws on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork to explore residents’ everyday experiences of urban militarisation in a ‘pacified’ favela in Brazil. The findings indicate some residents’ satisfaction with the police pacification unit (UPP) during its first years, when weapons were taken off the street. However, since 2017, shootouts have occurred daily, and favela residents now state that they feel like hostages between the police and traffickers and believe that the UPP never worked. I argue that the pacification programme operates drawing on ‘coloniality of power’, while unfolding new forms of militarisation/pacification as a changing-same, increasingly ‘borderising bodies’, as Mbembe writes. Simultaneously, as bodies are increasingly being borderised by the work of death, the struggles to decolonise territories also unfolds beyond the physical borders. The increased legitimisation of militarisation towards the urban poor draws on a ‘racial axis’, wherein certain bodies are seen as threats becoming contested ‘borders’.

The 22nd Convention of the Media Ecology Association

The 22nd Convention of the Media Ecology Association

Measuring mobility inequalities of favela residents based on mobile phone data

This study investigated the mobility patterns of favela residents based on an analysis of their daily movements derived from high-frequency mobile phone data. Daily movements were measured considering the distance traveled at different times of day over the course of more than two months. Potential trip purposes for the most frequently visited locations were inferred based on land use data from property taxes. The high volume of geocoded data from mobile phones enabled the analysis during multiple days, also covering weekends, usually not considered in traditional transport surveys. The mobile phone data indicated that, on average, favela residents go farther from home during business days and perform less out of home activities during weekends when compared with non-favela residents. Further, distinct patterns for favelas and non-favela residents were mapped, considering different geographical areas, revealing space and time mobility inequalities.

NECROPOLÍTICA NAS PERIFERIAS

O presente artigo busca analisar os impactos da Tutela Provisória Incidental na Medida Cautelar na Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental 635, que condicionou a realização de operações policiais nas comunidades periféricas da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, durante a pandemia de COVID-19, à necessidade de pedido escrito. Historicamente, é importante frisar que existe uma indiferença governamental na garantia de assistência aos moradores de favelas, que vivem em um estado de calamidade frente às operações policiais cotidianamente realizadas nesses espaços. A metodologia de pesquisa é qualitativa, com investigação jornalística e bibliográfica, por meio da análise de artigos científicos e documentos nacionais e internacionais. O resultado obtido é que, com a decisão do Ministro Edson Fachin, tendo em vista a diminuição de operações em regiões marginalizadas, houve, nos primeiros 15 dias, uma diminuição do número de mortes de habitantes das comunidades e de policiais, que demonstra um êxito momentâneo decisório.

Beyond the Favelas: An Analysis of Intraurban Poverty Patterns in Brazil

Despite evidence to the contrary, favelas still loom large in Brazilian social imaginary as the quintessential poverty pockets. No study to date has systematically examined the place of favelas within the broader geographies of poverty in Brazilian cities. How prominent are these settlements in the context of urban poverty? How do they fare when compared with other kinds of poor settlements? We tackled these questions by examining the sociospatial patterns of the poor population living in five metropolitan areas across the Brazilian territory. Using tract-level data from the 2010 census, we compared favela and non-favela residents through exploratory, inferential, and spatial analyses. Our results suggest that, although sharing the same socioeconomic and ethnic profile, favela and non-favela households are contrastingly distributed across urban spaces: Whereas favela inhabitants tend to live nearer city centers, non-favela inhabitants tend to concentrate in peripheries. This finding has multidimensional implications. At the empirical dimension it reinforces the importance of evidence-based geographical targeting for poverty alleviation policies. At the technical-normative dimension it challenges the official geospatial definition of favela currently in use. At the epistemological dimension it calls attention to the politics of labeling—calling a settlement a favela helps produce it as such—and how scholars must be critical of them.

INSURGENT PLANNING IN PANDEMIC TIMES: The Case of Rio de Janeiro

AbstractGiven the growing importance of populism in cities both empirically and in scholarly discourse, planning is increasingly grappling with this ‘unsettling era’, focusing on how to respond to these times. This opening provides an opportunity to re‐engage with the idea of insurgent planning—practices that are counter‐hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative—within populist contexts. I explore the case of mobilizations by community communicators in Complexo da Maré, a set of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the spread of COVID‐19 in 2020. In contrast to these mobilizations, Brazil's federal right‐wing populist government failed to attend to the needs of favela residents. Through the case of Maré's communicators, I highlight the need for planning to account for the role of insurgent planning as a response to populist contexts in cities of the global South.

“Racism is a perfect crime”: favela residents’ everyday experiences of police pacification, urban militarization, and prejudice in Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT This article examines residents’ everyday experiences and perceptions of changing urban politics and racism in a “pacified” favela, or poor informal neighbourhood, in Rio de Janeiro, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data from 2011 to 2018. The findings suggest that despite a discourse on inclusion, human rights, and citizenship, the police pacification program and urban security interventions aimed at “civilizing” the favela’s residents as “undesirable others,” drawing on racialization. The naturalization, legitimization, and reproduction of police violence promote the operation of racial and socio-spatial inequalities and privileges through what I describe as pigmentocratic everyday practices. These processes continually shape the condition of possibilities for the dehumanization of blackness, exclusion, inclusion, and resistance in a society influenced by the myth of racial democracy and that celebrates both diversity and ideologies of whitening.

Racialized Governance

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the eviction of residents from Vila Autódromo, a neighborhood that was decimated as Rio de Janeiro prepared to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Inspired by Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics” and Mindy Fullilove’s concept of “root shock,” we argue that forced evictions in Rio constitute a form of racialized governance. The authorities exclude favela residents from the citizenry security interventions are intended to protect and conceptualize them instead as security risks. This exclusion reflects the spatial expression of racial hierarchies in the city and produces a public security governance that in the case of Vila Autódromo terrorized residents and destroyed life conditions in their community. Racialized governance therefore exacerbates insecurity for large parts of the population.

Material Politics: Utility Documents, Claims‐Making and Construction of the “Deserving Citizen” in Rio de Janeiro

AbstractThrough an ethnographic study of a document in urban Brazil—the electricity bill—this article argues for developing a relational and materialist approach to citizenship. It analyzes the uses and meaning of this document for favela residents, the state, and the private electricity provider, within projects to regularize illegal connections and the so‐called “pacification” program, a state security policy to re‐establish state territorial control. It investigates the tensions between the market‐oriented processes of electricity regularization and citizenship by examining the implications of this contractual change on the way state and non‐state actors and residents frame rights and responsibilities linked to membership in society. Analysis of this document reveals how citizenship framing takes specific shape in line with both state reforms and urban processes of differentiation. It shows that the bill both materializes normative ideas of “deserving citizenship” as a territorial, moral, and material process, and realizes the potential for political contestation. The article thus expands on analysis of documents as material mediators of social and political relations and proposes an understanding of citizenship as a negotiated process involving people, state, and non‐state actors and objects.

Hashtag favela: Instagram, space and identity in urban Brazil

Instagram is a virtual, multi-authored platform that symbolizes geographic realities by allowing its users to capture time-and-space-specific characteristics through photographs or videos. As opposed to the selective reproduction of dominant discourses, Instagram users collaboratively produce multiple truths based on their own personal perceptions and experiences. Considering that favelas in Brazil are some of the most stigmatized, misrepresented and misunderstood places in the world, this article follows the term ‘favela’ (#favela) to better understand how it is being used by the masses in 2019. Ultimately, this article analyses the space and identity of ‘favelas’ in urban Brazil by dividing our findings into three separate categories: (1) ‘hashtag favela as advertising’, (2) ‘hashtag favela as tourism’ and (3) ‘hashtag favela as everyday’. We found that although Instagram promotes the ability of favela residents to represent themselves, #favela continues to be co-opted by outsiders. Interestingly, when the term is co-opted by outsiders, its meaning is transformed from a physical space or neighbourhood into one of the many types of commodities to be bought and sold.

"Pedagogy of Conversion" in the Urban Margins: Pacification, Education, and the Struggle for Control in a Rio de Janeiro Favela

In this article, I make an empirical contribution to the scholarship on education in urban settings that are affected by militarized policing and illicit drug markets. I offer insights into the role education played in the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), a pacification project in Rio de Janeiro favelas. Rio State authorities began to install UPPs in 2008 in an effort to regain control over favelas dominated by drug-trafficking groups and marked by high levels of violence. In this paper, which is based on an ethnographic case study I conducted between 2008 and 2015, I discuss the UPPs' struggle to gain the allegiance of favela residents. I focus in particular on police involvement in public primary schools and nonformal education geared toward young children living in the favelas that were part of the UPP project. Looking at one primary question—How does pacification influence education and what does this mean for local perceptions of police?—I reveal how the UPPs brought on the further militarization of education in Rio's favelas and show how paradoxical police practices in the urban margins may actually perpetuate the violence they are intended to combat.