RESEARCH

Photo by Teresa Caldeira

I am a scholar of cities, their political practices and formations of collective life. My research focuses on predicaments of urbanization and reconfigurations of spatial segregation and social discrimination, mostly in cities of the global south.  My current research investigates new formations of collective life especially in the peripheries of these cities.  I have been interested in studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization. I have also investigated the ways in which fear of violence and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves.  I have always worked in an interdisciplinary manner, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, and have been exploring how to reshape ethnographic methods for the study of cities.

Below are brief descriptions of the main themes I have been working on and references to works related to each one.  This division into different themes is a bit forced, as I frequently work through several of them in individual pieces.  The links in the references lead to full citations, texts, and translations

New Formations of Collective Life

Photo of a city street in Sao Paulo, featuring a small walking area with a fence inspired by the Sao Paulo skyline, in front of people walking past on the sidewalk..

Photo by Teresa Caldeira

Deep transformations have been reshuffling entrenched formations of gender hierarchies, family arrangements, class inequalities, and racial discrimination in São Paulo and in many urban areas in the global south. These changes are not monumental, broadcast on the evening news, or made especially visible in scholarly literature. They happen at the level of the everyday; seldom the result of organized action. They have not been planned by any kind of institution. Rather, these transformations have unfolded through small changes in practices here and there that, after at least two decades, have amounted to a revolution in ways of living together, reshaping femininities and masculinities, creating new kinds of families, reconceiving of racial identities, and challenging class barriers. The detection of these transformations requires paying attention to the everyday, to tacit ways of doing things, to ways of acting in concert with others, and to repertoires and languages people use to communicate and reflect on their lives –– in sum, attention to formations of collective life. 

The conception of formations of collective life has been formulated in dialogue with my colleagues Gautam Bhan, Kellie Gillespie and AbdouMaliq Simone. For years, our collaborative thinking has been fundamental to what I do. We elaborate this notion in the co-authored article “The Pandemic, Southern Urbanisms, and Collective Life.”

Emergent formations cannot be grasped with existing categories and accepted narratives. They introduce uncertainty in ways of understanding and should not be swiftly translated into known paradigms. My explorations with the notions of transitoriness and transversality are attempts to come up with alternative categories and methods of analysis.

Ethnographically, I have been researching new modes of living together and new formations of the family in the peripheries of São Paulo. I am focusing on solo mothers and absent fathers as a way of thinking about broader intertwined changes in patterns of gender, family, race, and class. I argue that analyzing the lives of solo mothers (women who raise children by themselves) allows us to identify a formation of collective life in the making and, consequently, the unmaking of an established pattern that tied together the categories of nuclear family, breadwinner, and housemaker.

Photo by Andy Mkosi

Related Publications

Peripheral Urbanization

Black and white photo of a collection of houses, surrounded by power lines

1980

1995

Photos by Teresa Caldeira

The investigation of the processes through which citizens build their own houses and simultaneously urbanize their cities and become crucial political actors, especially in contexts of democratization, has been constant in my career.  Recently, I brought together various trends of my investigations in the article “Peripheral Urbanization.”  I argue that peripheral urbanization refers to modes of the production of space that (a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. I also argue that peripheral urbanization not only produces heterogeneity within the city as it unfolds over time, but also varies considerably from one city to another.  

Related Publications:

See also the articles listed under: Political Participation, Democracy, and Urban Planning.

Pixação, Graffiti, Rap and the Remaking of Public Space

Cars drive on a highway past a wall covered in a graffiti painting, with skyscrapers sitting behind.
A city street in Sao Paulo. A woman on a sidewalk walks with her back turned, parallel to a wall painted with several works of graffiti.

Photos by Teresa Caldeira

In many places around the world, a diverse range of public practices and artistic interventions are transforming cities and their public spaces.  They include rap, break dance, graffiti, tagging, parkour, funk, and skateboarding.  I have mapped some of them in São Paulo.  These practices simultaneously expand the openness of the democratic public sphere and challenge it with transgressive actions ranging from the mildly illicit to the criminal. I argue that these co-existing and conflictual practices, now embedded in the everyday routines of the city, have created public spaces that take inequality for granted thus naturalizing it.  These practices, articulated as both artistic production and urban performance not only give the subaltern classes new visibility in the city but also express new forms of political action that are contradictory: they affirm rights to the city while fracturing the public with aggressiveness and transgression; they expose discrimination but refuse integration. 

Related Publications:

Political Participation, Democracy, and Urban Planning

Photo of a crowd of protesters. One individual holds a sign "Chega de Injustica Moradia Paz"

Photo by James Holston

I have always been concerned with the anthropological understanding of the predicaments of Brazilian democratic consolidation as they intersect with processes of urbanization. Part of my work deals directly with social movements and their transformations from the boom years of the late 1970s, still during the dictatorship, to the present era of protests in the post-Arab Spring mode. I have paid especial attention to the simultaneous expansion and retraction of rights in democratic processes.  Women have been dominant protagonists in social movements and I have highlighted their capacity to create new spaces for articulation and mobilization and simultaneously to provoke transformations that affect cultural patterns of inequality and authoritarianism embedded in everyday life.  I have also focused on the way in which residents of the urban peripheries have conceived of power, politics, and their engagement in electoral processes. 

I have examined a significant shift in the paradigm of urban planning in Brazil brought about by the 1988 Citizen Constitution and by the 2001 City Statute. James Holston and I have studied this innovation and bold intervention in planning by comparing it to the previous model of modernist planning and analyzing its implementation in recent urban plans. Our analysis demonstrates how democracy has taken root in Brazilian society and in the everyday life of the city, as it generates innovative laws based on radical conceptions of social justice and creates new instruments of urban intervention aimed at bringing about social equalization.

Related Publications:

Violence, Democracy, and Spatial Segregation

Photos by Teresa Caldeira

One of my largest projects has analyzed the ways in which violent crime, fear, and spatial segregation become entangled with processes of democratic consolidation in Brazil and elsewhere.  It thus analyzes the reverse side of the expansion of citizenship and urbanization that I researched in the projects listed under Political Participation, Democracy, and Urban Planning.  

The universe of crime offers a fertile context in which stereotypes circulate and social discrimination is shaped -- not only in São Paulo, but everywhere.   This universe of crime and fear is obviously not the only one generating discrimination in contemporary societies.  But its investigation is especially important because it stimulates the development of two novel modes of discrimination: the privatization of security and the seclusion of some social groups in fortified and private enclaves. Focusing on São Paulo and using comparative data on Los Angeles, City of Walls suggests that the new pattern of urban segregation developing in these cities also appears in many metropolises around the world.  This pattern is based on the construction of fortified enclaves and exemplifies the emergence of a new model of organizing social differences in urban space that crystalized during the process of democratic consolidation and expansion of citizenship rights.  Therefore, this is a book about how social inequality is reproduced in contemporary cities and about how this reproduction intersects with processes that, in theory, should eliminate discrimination and authoritarianism.

This trend of work on violence has also generated several discussions about the contradictory process of simultaneous expansion and retraction of rights in democratic process, an insight that James Holston and I formulated in the concept of disjunctive democracy.

Related Publications

Methods, Authorship: Problematizing the Production of Knowledge

Photo by Teresa Caldeira

I am an anthropologist who has always used ethnographic methods to study cities and whose research has approached them from the perspective of segregated and discriminated against spaces, especially their poor peripheries.  Two central concerns of my ethnographic investigations and of my writings have been: how to address issues of inequality and class distance in the practice of ethnographic research?; and how to conceive of authorship in the creation of anthropological knowledge, especially when based on research that takes inequality not only as its subject but also as what shapes the relationship of the ethnographer with her collaborators?  I have dealt with these questions throughout my career, but have addressed them directly in these works:

Related Publications

Ruth Cardoso

Over three decades, I have collaborated closely with Ruth Cardoso, my first and most influential mentor. She was a pioneer anthropologist who helped to consolidate the study of cities and of political action in a discipline for which these subjects had not been considered legitimate. Her methodological contributions to the study of urban cultures as well as her insightful analyzes of social movements and their role in the transitions to democracy in Latin America are especially noteworthy. I organized the volume that reunites all her academic articles, which I edited and annotated. I have also written a comprehensive Introduction to the volume, highlighting the innovative character of her work, her intellectual posture, and her significant influence in studies of urban transformation, political action, social movements, and gender in Latin America from the 1950s to the 2000s.

Related Publications: