Search

This paper interrogates the extent to which imaginaries of climate and ecological breakdown attend to the memories, knowledges, and experiences of communities already impacted by histories of racism, colonialism, and poverty. Drawing on insights from Black studies and decolonial thinking, the article reflects on how the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change can be mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and social dispossession. Specific emphasis is given to Rio de Janeiro, notably its port area, a geographical space where future-oriented narratives remain oblivious to the city's history of anti-Black violence and Indigenous genocide. In parallel, the paper looks at the recently built Museum of Tomorrow and its public representations of the Anthropocene. Overall, the article contends that pluralising accounts of the Anthropocene might offer alternative epistemic entry points for understanding and interrupting the mounting ecological catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to critical and Southern urban studies by discussing how the notion of hybridity is useful to understand contemporary modes of politics rooted in equality pursuits and crafted by peripheral subjects. It analyses the birth, discourses and tactics of three grassroots groups in Rocinha, an immense peripheral settlement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to show how modern insurgent claims – based on material urban rights – are intertwined with other grammars of justice, such as the politics of intersectional difference, critical pedagogies, solidarity and care. These cases suggest that contemporary insurgency builds on rights-based citizenship claims to create unique pathways that somehow articulate the universality and relationality of justice. I suggest that hybrid insurgent citizenship operates like a braid in which different strategies are uniquely and interdependently linked over time. Whilst in Rocinha the central thread is insurgency, the same logics could apply to other context-situated political traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the majority of Brazilian public schools, poverty and social injustice prevail. Most students come from disadvantaged realities, and their future seems to be already defined by a lack of social mobility, exclusion from civil rights, and violence—a situation that has worsened with the global pandemic. Rooted in ethnographic research in public schools in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, this paper explores the role of pedagogies of care in creating alternative, possible, and preferable narratives about the future of these students. By using the metaphor of "school as soil", the study identifies care in four dimensions: time, heterogeneity, mattering, and fertility. It draws on 12 semi-structured interviews with teachers from eight different public schools that were part of a larger doctoral project. By researching school as soil, we examine how pedagogies of care encourage teachers' speculation about preferable imaginaries for the future of their students. Results show that despite precarious resources and scarce institutional support, pedagogies of care appear in multiple reported situations, aiming to inspire learning processes, give voice and agency to the socially marginalized, and allow for ways of thinking that offer alternatives to the seemingly ubiquitous oppressive relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the effect on local economies when the state intervenes to capture its own territories back from non-state actors? In 2008, the government of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, implemented a policy to take control of favelas that were previously dominated by organized crime groups (OCGs). We use day and night luminosity to assess the effects of this program on economic growth. The difference-in-differences design shows that state intervention has a significant and negative average treatment effect on the favelas that received the intervention. We further test a mechanism to explain this economic downturn: institutional replacement. Based on crime data, we demonstrate that this effect is caused by the destruction of local markets, especially illicit activities. The data highlight the perils of order transition, even when OCGs are removed by state actors. Furthermore, this paper reinforces the need for policies that are mindful of the externalities of institutional shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the multiple and heterogeneous, current and potential, relations between hybrid actors of tourism in Favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to elucidate the legitimizing potential of tourists acting as "connectors" that reach beyond formal politics' hindrances. This work applies assemblage theory epistemological framework, and Actor-Network Theory ethnomethodological tools, to explore the issues and roles questioned, altered, made visible, or transformed through favela tourists' practices and performances. Hence, avoiding the ethical dilemmas and representational concerns from slum tourism researchers in the past. Our fieldwork engages with two favela tours. We follow tourists as they stitch hybrid actor-networks that create multiple orderings in such assemblages, and their material and semiotic configurations. Our research reveals that such tours could be related to different shifts in the favela's political, social, economic, cultural, and material dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, in 1822, Brazil declared its independence from Portugal, its vast territory was little known by the central government in Rio de Janeiro. There was a great need to create reliable maps that would delineate the new country's boundaries. This paper aims to show how a practical application of astronomy, specifically geodesy, was vital in the efforts to build the nation. We follow the professional life of an astronomer, Luis Cruls, director of the National Observatory, professor at the Military School and chief researcher of several expeditions, to discuss the strength of geodesic and cartographic activities in Brazil at the end of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian colonial context led the Tupiniquim, an Indigenous group, and the Portuguese, a colonizing group, from the São Vicente area to connect with two places in Rio de Janeiro. In this scenario emerges the genealogy of two Tupiniquim women of the 16th century from São Vicente, which allowed us to trace six generations of women who formed kinship relationships with Portuguese men. They moved to Rio de Janeiro to create the Cara de Cão fortification and Camorim sugar plantation. They were members of the communities that appropriated and transformed Portuguese coarse ware ceramics into what is now termed Paulistaware. This article shows a new understanding of the social role of Indigenous women and the entry of European men into symmetrical gender relations based on the logic of Tupiniquim social collaboration. Tupiniquim women initially produced Paulistaware before 1550. After 1600 these ceramics were also made and consumed by people from the African diaspora and others from outside, adding decorative elements found in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The intensive analysis of archival data breaks the traditional model of homogenization and Europeanization of historical processes and events, highlighting the itinerancy of practices and mobility of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyse the role of emotion in the context of informal science education experiences, specifically seeking to understand: (a) which emotions can be stimulated in families visiting interactive expositions, and (b) the extent to which parents/caregivers and museum explainers engage the children's emotional expressiveness. To this end, a protocol based on the core affect model was employed to examine the visits of 10 family groups (26 individuals) who visited an exhibit on biodiversity in a science museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Five families went on free visits and the other five had their visits mediated by explainers. We observed that, in general, positive emotions, such as excitement and surprise, were among those most often expressed. Negative emotions, such as disagreement and doubt, also stood out in this study, but they were not exclusively associated with the negative aspects of the experience, and were instead linked to challenging moments that facilitated the construction of meaning by the families. The data suggest that visits mediated by explainers occasioned more frequent emotional displays than free visits, indicating the importance of explainers in families' interactions and emotional responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of 'urban informality' in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio's history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century. Our argument is that the concept of informality, while signaling an important shift in how favelas were understood, also perpetuated orientalist epistemologies in theories of urban development. This helps to explain why the term gained traction when it did, as well as why it remains salient today. In Rio, this means that changing understandings of favelas over the last century reveal little about actual changes within favelas, and more about how different geographic imaginaries were projected onto them, reflecting specific 'problems' confronting the city at different moments in history. This is important for seeing how conceptualizations of favelas – including the ways we understand urban informality – tend to mirror a host of latent social and political anxieties connected to urban development, including attempts to govern and control informal space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dengue, Zika, and chikungunya are arboviral diseases (AVD) transmitted mainly by Aedes aegypti. Rio de Janeiro city, Brazil, has been endemic for dengue for over 30 years, and experienced the first joint epidemic of the three diseases between 2015-2016. They present similar symptoms and only a small proportion of cases are laboratory-confirmed. These facts lead to potential misdiagnosis and, consequently, uncertainty in the registration of the cases. We have available the number of cases of each disease for the n = 160 neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. We propose a Poisson model for the total number of cases of Aedes -borne diseases and, conditioned on the total, we assume a multinomial model for the allocation of the number of cases of each of the diseases across the neighborhoods. This provides simultaneously the estimation of the associations of the relative risk of the total cases of AVD with environmental and socioeconomic variables; and the estimation of the probability of presence of each disease as a function of available covariates. Our findings suggest that a one standard deviation increase in the social development index decreases the relative risk of the total cases of AVD by 28%. Neighborhoods with smaller proportion of green area had greater odds of having chikungunya in comparison to dengue and Zika. A one standard deviation increase in population density decreases the odds of a neighborhood having Zika instead of dengue by 18% but increases the odds of chikungunya in comparison to dengue by 18% and by 43% in comparison to Zika. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the effect of Brazil's national tourism brand on the image of Rio de Janeiro as the host city of the 2016 Olympic Games, and the reciprocal effect of Rio de Janeiro on Brazil, considering both as tourist destinations. A quantitative study was employed using structured questionnaires, with a sample of foreign respondents (n = 340) and a simultaneous equation method. A positive reciprocal effect was found. In general, the perception of a country as a tourist destination influences destinations within that country. However, the Brazil destination brand image did not influence Rio. This situation was proved to be an exception to the rule, the sports mega-event context probably contributing to the result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a creative disjunctive feminist analysis of affective rhythms within a complexly bordered complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It explores the gendered atmospheric constitution of authority in the favela's violent border spaces, arguing that authority is partly embodied through a channelling of attention. Attention is conceptualised as involving not just conscious intentions, perceptions and emotions, but also non-conscious rhythms of autonomous affective self-regulation. The article is structured through a tripartite disjunctive form that expresses the bordering of city, body and experience. Drawing on qualitative interview data, quantitative electrodermal activity physiological data and creative writing, the article dwells with the materiality of words and the forms of affects to express material and physiological aspects of emotion and affect in journeys around the internal border-spaces of the city. Adapting the modernist tradition of 'stream of consciousness' writing, we style a 'stream of attention' form of writing that expresses multiple modes of embodied, conscious and preconscious attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing 'the poor' in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps' mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do organized criminal groups (OCGs) respond to military interventions intended to weaken and subdue them? In many cases, such crackdowns have proven counterproductive as OCGs militarize, engage in violence, and confront state forces directly. Existing studies have pointed to several explanations: inter-criminal competition, unconditional militarized approaches, and existing criminal governance arrangements. Much of this work, however, has focused on national, regional, or even municipal level variation and explanations. This article takes a micro-comparative approach based on 18 months of ethnographic research in a group of Rio de Janeiro favelas (impoverished and informal neighborhoods) divided between three drug trafficking gangs and occupied by the Brazilian military from 2014 to 2015. It argues that an active territorial threat from a rival is the primary mechanism leading OCGs to respond violently to military intervention. It also demonstrates that geographic patterns of recruitment play an important role in where OCG rivalries turn violent during intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social housing sector is playing an important role in Brazil, due to the necessity of its expansion. Currently, many residential projects perform poorly in terms of energy efficiency and thermal comfort. In addition, the impact of climate change on energy consumption may aggravate the energy scenario, increasing the dependence on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. In parallel to this, there is a growing adoption of the Structural Concrete Insulated Panels (SCIP) and insulated concrete form (ICF) in the Brazilian construction industry, due to their advantages in reducing construction time, and cost. Therefore, this study provides a discussion on thermal-energy performance focusing on parametric analysis of the SCIP and ICF wall systems adoption for social housing in Brazil. Due to the fact that building performance is heavily affected by weather conditions, this study evaluated the computer simulation of the thermal-energy performance of SCIP and ICF wall systems for hot climates while addressing the impacts of climate change. The city of Rio de Janeiro, characterized by the tropical climate was selected, and the Climate Change World Weather File Generator (CCWorldWeatherGen) tool was used to produce weather data for future climate scenarios, such as 2020, 2050 and 2080. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how class, consumerism, and employment influence beliefs of an idealized digital world in marginalized communities. I recount 24 months of ethnographic and institutional observation in a non-governmental organization that promoted the concept of " utopia digital " (digital utopia in Portuguese) in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns). This corporate-funded non-governmental organization employed members of Brazil's traditional middle class and promoted the liberating potentials of digital inclusion to members of a "New Middle Class" made up of 35 million "previously poor" Brazilians. Interviews with middle-class employees reveal how ideas of digital utopia act as a code for corporate efforts to encourage consumerism among the New Middle Class and bolster employment opportunities for members of Brazil's traditional middle class. Reflecting on informal conversations, I also highlight a middle-class "crime talk" that frames the favela as an inherently violent place and, in contrast to their inclusionary work related to digital utopia, encourages non-governmental organization workers to physically avoid favela space. I use Zygmunt Bauman's discussion of an "active" or "hunter" utopia as an ethnographic lens to discuss the practical and everyday experiences of technological inclusion in classed settings. By describing digital utopias as actively shaped by everyday understandings of urban exclusion and privilege, this article provides an ethnographic framework for decoding the socially reproductive nature of class-inflected consumer interventions in marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]