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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]

Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, "militias" weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the basis and not only the outcome of spatial claims to power. To sustain this contribution, I turn to local scales and add insights from ethnographic studies on how paramilitary groups affect the lives of residents. I trace the paramilitary influence along their terrain-shaping and urban development activities. The empirical basis of my argument is drawn from the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, looking at how "militias"—emerging as armed developers out of a past as Death Squads—expand their influence by investing in urban development. In this paper, "militia" is conceived as a floating signifier. As such, the meaning of militia is contested, as it encompasses a wide range of practices including civil construction, laying infrastructure, and landscaping. This way, the term "militia" becomes a cornerstone of a militarized urban development discourse and practice. "Militia," as the encompassing center of a narrative cluster, bolsters bellicose forms of governing urban expansion, thereby further militarizing the everyday life of a large part of the marginalized urban society. [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]

This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with “smart” technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a “un-black boxing” of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—, which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his playing days, the Brazilian striker Romário was one of the most famous footballers in the world. He played for three of Brazil’s top clubs in Rio de Janeiro, as well as Barcelona and PSV Eindhoven. He won the World Cup and scored over one-thousand goals throughout his career. After this successful career, Romário entered politics, first as a deputy in the city of Rio and later as a senator in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Romário’s electoral success is not simply down to his footballing ability, nor the popularity of the sport in Brazil. Sports stardom, celebrity and celebrity politicians are also engaging with complex cultural processes. He has traded on his footballing stardom, but he also connects with his electorate through specific policy campaigns that resonate particularly well with his Brazilian voters. More importantly, he uses football and his footballer career as a metaphor for the wider problems facing Brazilian society. Drawing on literature from Sports Stardom, Celebrity and Celebrity Politicians, this paper charts the political career of Romário within the socio-political context of Brazil and argues that celebrity politicians still need to engage with their audiences regardless of their previous careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children’s autonomy has stood as a main goal in the process of educational transmission understood as an increasing capacity on children's part to share the normative encodings of social life supported by the self’s rational choice. This notion of autonomy leads to a reified view of human capacities over and above cultural and contextual particularities that, in fact, determine how subjects seek to understand norms in face of the ever changing demands of social life. Based on a one year long empirical research, using a variety of ethnographic approaches, this paper problematizes such a notion of autonomy and analyses how youth of a state school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, voice their demands and dissatisfactions and question the status quo. The preservation of the social imaginary of distinctiveness and past achievements of the school was found to hinder feelings and opinions of disapproval by students and devalue unanticipated and novel situations felt to be disruptive and menacing. Tensions in the school social dynamics were fuelled in the direction of an arena over which the students could find no interference from teachers and could manage by themselves: that of peer relationships and friendships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The awarding of the 2016 Summer Olympics to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil continues the trend of international sports mega-events being hosted in the global South and constructed and promoted as part of long-term development plans and policies. Rio 2016 also connects with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) current commitment to international development and global humanitarianism. In this paper, we examine the proliferation of this agenda through official online Olympic communication and compare it against critical perspectives from activist bloggers concerned with development issues specific to Rio 2016. The results support the notions that the internet can be used both to serve and challenge processes of capitalist accumulation and that political debates and contestations, such as those regarding development policy, are increasingly ‘amplified’ online. We argue, therefore, that while the IOC and Olympic stakeholders use the internet in support of neoliberal and modernist notions of development, online communications also offer important avenues for disseminating current critiques of, and resistance to, Olympic hosting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through selective readings of literary chronicles, artistic and media representations, this paper explores how a particular kind of crowd – the carnival crowd – has been interpreted and represented in key periods of Rio de Janeiro's history. I argue that the temporal, spatial and aesthetic configurations of the carnival crowd express the bodily dimensions of a profane collective celebration that mirrors the distinct cultural negotiations of the city. In contemporary Rio de Janeiro, the return of the carnival crowd also highlights old and new forms of public interaction. The presence of partying multitudes in the streets of the city posits considerable organizational and social challenges. But the carnival crowd is endorsed by the media, the municipal authorities and the tourist industry because it represents a major source of commercial profit, it promotes a mythical image of the hedonistic city and it also expresses an ultimate celebratory occupation of public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explicate our research on technology-mediated urban experience specific to two hyper-local tests in which the space of the 'public' is transformed into a virtual network by connective broadcasting. The first case study presents collective mapping in Rio de Janeiro toward increased civic engagement and sustainability, the second tests documentation of political demonstrations for strategic and archival purposes for Occupy Boston. Grouped under the term "participatory urbanism," the projects intend to explore how an individual activates interstitial space (between the physical city and hovering networks, between public and private) by engaging technology and civic media to affect change in the built environment. The physical and virtual environments serve as reciprocal sources of information, engendering a collective practice of shared encounters. We investigate how such encounters of user-centered activity through mobile and web-based media support or implicate the perception and manipulation of the built environment over spans of time and locations, and will highlight qualitative elements of a mobile and web platform designed for successful civic engagement and participatory urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

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 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 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]

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]

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]

Refugees tend to be a neglected population during health emergencies. This article studies how the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Brazil affected forcibly displaced people considering their intersectional multiple identities. I conducted 29 semistructured phenomenological interviews with refugees living in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro between March 27 and April 06, 2020. These states' governors closed nonessential services and schools. The results indicate that refugees face three challenges connected to this pandemic: (a) same challenges as Brazilians due to their labor vulnerability social identity, (b) challenges aggravated by the pandemic due to their identity of nonnationals including access to information and services, and (c) new challenges due to their social identity of forced displaced nonnationals including closing of migration services and borders and the feeling of "living the pandemic twice." This research contributes to the literature of intersectionality and asylum by understanding how refugees in the Global South are affected by pandemics and responses to them, considering their own lived experiences and multiple social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are promising machines always holding out prospects for better lives, always attempting to guarantee that things will not remain the same and that whatever changes do ensue are for the better. We propose a notion of "promise" not as simply another descriptor in a long line of adjectives about the city. Rather, we argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises as way of anticipation, which in turn allows residents to write themselves into select urban operations. This article engages two central districts in Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta to explore how residents "stand by" the promise, not of passive waiting, but as maneuvers of either staying tuned to or as way of tactical detachment from the multiple trajectories which have been conjured up in the here and now. We understand these maneuvers as acts of "minor" future making that rely upon practices and materials that may seem of little use, but which enable a process of incremental small adjustments and collective subversion of urban trajectories of the transitory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a shot put, there are different finite variables that can be controlled by the thrower, including release angle, release height, release direction, and release velocity. Previous studies have determined thresholds of release velocity necessary for achieving certain distances, and this case study sought to expand upon that concept. Conclusions from key biomechanical data can make a significant difference in the performance of athletes in the shot put if properly understood by coaches. By utilizing this scientific approach to the shot put event, the throws coach will be able to determine more accurate adjustments and devise training stimuli to better accommodate the athlete. In this case study, researchers and the coach attempted to bridge the gap in the approach to teaching and coaching the glide shot put by using a physics-based equation regarding projectile motion in tandem with biomechanical analyses. The use of immediate feedback via video analysis was an essential part the coaching and teaching system. The athlete's release angles decreased, and her maximum release velocities increased from 12.5 m/s in 2015 to 13.1 m/s in 2016. This USATF coaching education shot put project is an example in which the cooperation between sport science and coaching helped to produce an Olympic berth (19.24 m) by Felisha Johnson in the women's shot put in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to distinguish between, on the one hand, emerging ideas, values and representations and, on the other, the actual circumstances in which they are applied by society. For this purpose the juridical field is a privileged place for investigation being at the same time the locus of norms and conflicts. In particular, our attention focuses on environment-related litigation in Rio de Janeiro. The distance between legal discourse and my analysis of lawsuits pertaining to the environment in Rio de Janeiro is a result of the tension between the universal character of the environmental perspective, as embodied in Brazilian legislation and the lack of social mobilisation combined with the complexity of kinds of actors and interests involved in juridical practices concerning environmental protection. It is suggested that this tension be understood in the light of the dynamics of social relations in the urban context of Rio de Janeiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general purposes of the PROVIVA project are to establish a community HIV/AIDS surveillance and monitoring system in Rio de Janeiro and to develop, implement, and evaluate a community-based HIV/AIDS prevention and intervention program for cocaine injectors and snorters, and male transvestite sex workers, in Rio's shantytowns, prostitution districts, and other neighborhoods where rates of street drug use are high. A secondary purpose is to develop an effective field-based HIV prevention program that can be used in other communities throughout Latin America and perhaps other developing nations. Conducting research in an international setting in general, and establishing a community-based seroprevalence and prevention project in a developing nation in particular, presented a myriad of procedural and logistical obstacles and complications. Within this context, this paper reviews the requirements of the National Institute on Drug Abuse cooperative agreement projects, examines the issues and problems associated with implementing this kind of research in a developing nation, and suggests appropriate solutions for dealing with these emergent circumstances and difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study of migration, natural increase and city growth with regard to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. The processes associated with the demographic transition from high to low vital rates in developing countries are progressively being understood as divergent from those prevailing during the chronologically earlier transitions occurring in the developed Western nations. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the nature of those demographic relationships which culminate in the unprecedented city growth of developing areas. Moreover, although several studies have concentrated on apportioning the relative contribution of natural increase and migration, few have paid systematic attention to the factor of migrant natural increase. Such an oversight can assume considerable proportions since, depending upon the dimensions of prior migratory moves, migrant natural increase could conceivably play a commanding role, even to the point of competing with either native natural increase or net migration. In an effort to illustrate the manner in which components of urban growth can concretely interact in an urban developing area, the growth processes operating in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the period 1920-1970 are presented here.

Cooperation in regional international organizations (RIOs) can help member states to work toward and perhaps achieve policy goals that would not be feasible unilaterally. Thus, RIOs might be used as a means of states to compensate for domestic shortcomings in output performance. Do states equip RIOs with policy competencies in order to compensate corresponding domestic performance shortcomings? The analysis of a novel database on policy competencies of 76 RIOs between 1945 and 2015 reveals that usually RIOs are not usually used as window-dressing devices by which states disguise limited domestic output performance. Instead, governments tend to equip RIOs with policy competencies in order to further strengthen their already good output performance in most policy areas. However, in the policy area, ‘energy’ states tend to confer more competencies to their respective RIOs, the worse they perform domestically, indicating that output-related compensation dynamics might be at play in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assemblage thinking offers a new conceptual toolkit for analysing the relationship between society and space. However, major questions remain regarding both its ontological propositions and how it might be applied to the analysis of specific socio-spatial objects. This article contributes to these debates by using assemblage thinking to trace the long-term development of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. These territories have undergone a range of seemingly contradictory changes over recent decades. On one hand, expanded infrastructure and service provision and improved social outcomes have meant favelas have moved closer to, and in some cases surpassed, areas officially designated as “formal”. On the other, they continue to be heavily stigmatised, targeted by exceptional forms of governance, and subject to militarisation and abuse by police and non-state armed groups. Tracing these developments over time, I argue that the favela is best understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous, interacting elements that operate according to diverse logics. Despite continual pressures to deterritorialise, or break apart, a density of components and relations has ensured the continual reterritorialisation of the “favela” as a distinct object of perception and action over more than a century, with far reaching consequences for residents and the wider city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the variegated urbanization of technology-based economies through the lenses of a comparative analysis looking at New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Over the last decade, the former has gained a reputation as a ‘model tech city’ at the global level, while the latter is an example of emerging ‘start-up city’. Using a Marxist-Foucauldian approach, the article argues that, while technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s arose from the late Keynesian state, the globally hegemonic phenomenon of start-up urbanism is illustrative of an increasingly decentralized neoliberal project of self-governing ‘enterprise society’, mobilizing ideas of community, cooperation and horizontality within a context of cognitive-communicative capitalism in which urban environments acquire renewed centrality. In doing so, the article underlines start-up urbanism’s key contribution to the reinvention of the culture of global capitalism in times of perceived economic shrinkage worldwide and the central role played by major metropolitan centres in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Graham R. V. Hughes from the London Lupus Centre of London Bridge Hospital in London, England delivered at the 14th International Congress on Antiphospholipid Antibodies in Rio de Janiero, Brazil in October 2013. Hughes talked about the present work on antiphospholipid from clinicians and based on doctors' letters.

Chronicle literature in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro developed in tandem with the urban modernization that followed the abolition of slavery in 1888. Writers-flâneurs strolled city streets to observe human behavior in the new post-abolition urban environment. The street vendor, a fellow traveler within the city, was quickly identified by chroniclers as an integral component of the modern city. Ruling elites, however, viewed street commerce as a blot on the modern urban landscape and sought to prohibit vending through a series of policies that vendors often contested. Chroniclers and newspapers’ embrace of vendors therefore reveals the ambivalence that marked the effort to define modernity. Although connected to the city’s slave past, street vendors came to represent a modern urban membership unique to the Brazilian capital. The practice of street commerce and the intellectual culture surrounding it reflects how “walking the city” carved an alternative urban citizenship and sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Latino male bisexual experience has remained under-studied and under-theorized in much of the recent sexuality research. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, this article seeks to examine the cultural patterns and social contexts in which male bisexual experiences took shape in these urban centers, and to explore and refine a number of key theoretical formulations that have been developed in recent sexuality research. It examines the ways in which bisexual desires take shape, the choreography of sexual interactions with both male and female partners, and the continuities and changes that seem to be taking place in these settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on several conferences related to noise and vibration, including the Ship Noise and Vibration conference to be held at the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) in London, England on November 24-25, 2010 and the 18th International Congress on Sound and Vibration (ICSV18) to be held on July 10-14, 2011 at the Windsor Berra in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

From June 20 to 22, 2012, 45,000 participants from governments, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and major groups met in Rio De Janeiro for the “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The outcome document titled “The Future We Want” alludes to a grand vision for addressing global challenges in the framework of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. But the 53-page long document only reiterates promises made elsewhere. It fails to lay out a coherent roadmap forward, much less to define binding targets with specific deadlines. The declaration, however, does reflect a changing political reality in international negotiations. Developing countries are playing a much more assertive role in pushing poverty eradication as the overarching priority than at any time before. Rio+20 furthermore presents a snapshot of the divers interests and voices that shape the discourse on sustainable development, 20 years after the original 1992 Rio Conference launched the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores several questions related to international adoption and other kinds of informal and formal circulation of children, with a particular attention to how birth mothers lose those children, that developed out of a conversation at a conference on the circulation children in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It examines the problems of adoption based on diverse perspectives of several scholars. It also discusses why Brazilian feminists have not rallied around the cause of birth mothers.

The author discusses the achievements of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. The author mentions how the said conference provides a process which balances governmental regulations and free markets. Moreover, he cites how the said processes connects on the integration of sustainable development and trade rules.

This article, based on ethnographic research conducted with people in Brazil and Zimbabwe, reports organization/management experiences and narratives of poor and marginalized people of the south. South embodies the organizational struggle, survival skills and resilience of marginal and urban outcasts that inhabit inner cities, townships and slums. The article employs the notion of kukiya-favela organization, i.e. the organization of the excluded, to engage with them in order to: give voice to those who dwell at the margins of organization studies; make their narratives part of a subject that retains an elitist position; and re-address the Eurocentric management/organization discourse that imposes a legitimate justification for exploiting, excluding and labelling them as organization-less and urban outcasts of society. The article concludes that despite their marginality and exclusion they are able to construct local diverse meaningful (organizational) identities that can represent them with dignity in their struggle for justice and basic human rights. Finally, it reflects on the contribution this has for us, in organization studies, by opening new spaces for the study of organization[al] (lives) not from positions of ‘above’ or ‘against’ but ‘with’ (Gergen, 2003: 454). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Viral load (VL) near delivery is a determinant of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV. To evaluate factors associated with an undetectable VL near delivery in HIV-infected pregnant women receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and non-HAART regimens, HIV-infected pregnant women with a detectable VL at entry and having used antiretrovirals for ≤4 weeks before delivery were selected. Multivariate analysis was employed using binary logistic unconditional models; the dependent variable was having a VL <400 copies/mL near delivery. VL suppression was achieved in 403/707 women (57%): 65.4% in the HAART group, but only 26% in the non-HAART group P = 0.001. Duration of HAART was correlated with VL suppression, with maximum benefit seen after ≤12 weeks of therapy (odds ratio [OR]: 2.51; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.72-3.65). CD4+ cell count near delivery (OR: 1.53; 95% CI: 1.06-2.20) and baseline VL (OR: 0.74; 95% CI: 0.58-0.94) were also independently associated with VL suppression. Overall MTCT rate was 1.6%. HAART for ≤12 weeks, baseline VL and CD4 cell count near delivery were independently associated with viral suppression near delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction (JHR) is a syndrome observed after antimicrobial treatment of some infectious diseases. The syndrome has clinical characteristics of an inflammatory reaction to antibiotic treatment. A prospective study of patients with a clinical and laboratory diagnosis of syphilis was conducted at a sexually transmitted diseases clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Patients were treated with benzathine penicillin and observed for the JHR. A total of 115 patients were included in this study. Fifty-one patients (44%) had secondary syphilis; 37 (32%), primary; 26 (23%), latent; and one (1 %), tertiary syphilis. Ten patients (9%) developed the JHR. All JHRs occurred in patients with secondary and latent syphilis. No patients experienced an allergic reaction to penicillin. The JHR occurred less frequently than in previous studies. It is important that health-care professionals recognize the clinical characteristics of the JHR so that it is not misinterpreted as an allergic reaction to penicillin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the issue of water quality restoration in Guanabara Bay, a much polluted estuary, located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which serves as drainage basin for 11 million people. The theoretical basis for analyzing the problem is the systems approach, and the focus is on devising actions to achieve the modernization of the sanitation sector. In order to restore the bay's water quality, specific targets measured in terms of the level of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) need to be attained. The Guanabara Bay system contains five components: decision support tools, physical infrastructure, financing, governance, and administration. The article proposes a policy approach that seeks to attend to the environmental concerns associated with the restoration of the bay's water quality by advocating an effective governance structure able to provide sanitary services to all citizens that will also mitigate the bay's pollution problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider models for spatio-temporal processes which assume either non-negative values, and often are observed as zero, or discrete values and are also inflated by zeros. Typically, in the first case, the spatial observations are obtained at fixed locations (point-referenced data) over a region D; whereas in the second, the region D is divided into a finite number of regular or irregular subregions (areal level), resulting in observations for each subregion. Our main idea is based on those of zeroinflated models, by assuming that the value observed at location s and time t , Yt (s), is a realization of a mixture between a Bernoulli distribution with a probability of success θt (s) and a probability density function or probability function p(yt (s) ∣ .). For both cases, we include spatio-temporal latent processes in the model to account for the possible extra variation present in the mean structure of θt (s) and/or p(yt (s) ∣ .). In the context of point-referenced data, we model the amount of rainfall over the city of Rio de Janeiro during 75 weeks; whereas in the areal data level case, we consider weekly cases of dengue fever in the city of Rio de Janeiro during the years of 2001-02. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to describe the adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) among adolescents followed-up in Rio de Janeiro. This cross-sectional study included all adolescents (aged 10-19 years) followed at Instituto de Puericultura e Pediatria Martagão Gesteira and Hospital Universitário Clementino Fraga Filho. Adherence was determined by selfreport (number of missed ART doses in three days prior to the interview). Adherence was categorized as taking ⩾95% of the ARTs (adherent), or <95% (non-adherent). Variables related to demographics and treatment were evaluated and if P value ⩽0.15, they were selected for a logistic regression analysis. One hundred and one adolescents were interviewed. The mean time on ART was 91 months and the mean adherence was 94% of this, 21 were non-adherent, and 80 adherent. The risk factors associated with non-adherence were: if the patient was not concerned about ART, odds ratio (OR) = 3.47 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.13- 10.68); if they do not carry an extra dose of ART, OR = 6.63 (95% CI = 1.73-25.47); if a health-care worker taught them how to take ART, OR = 0.27 (95% CI = 0.08-0.93). Adherence among adolescents was higher than expected. Factors associated with lack of adherence were: interviewees being unaware of ARTs and lack of commitment to the treatment. Interventions involving these factors must be evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of a twenty-four-item scale to measure attitudes toward gender norms among young men: the Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) Scale. Scale items on gender norms related to sexual and reproductive health, sexual relations, violence, domestic work, and homophobia are designed. Items are based on previous qualitative work in the community and a literature review and administered to a household sample of 742 men, including 223 young men ages fifteen to twenty-four, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The current analysis focuses on the young men, as they were the main audience for a planned intervention to promote gender equitable and HIV risk reduction behaviors. Factor analyses support two subscales, and the scale is internally consistent (alpha = .81). As hypothesized, more support for equitable norms (i.e., higher GEM Scale scores) is significantly associated with less self-reported partner violence, more contraceptive use, and a higher education level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2000 and March 2001 an environmental chemical survey was carried out in a printing facility in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In this investigation about 250 volatile organic compounds were identified and quantified. The maximum concentration of any compound measured was toluene at 7.8mg·m-3. The high levels of total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) detected overall ranged from 1.9 to 46.1mg·m-3 exceeding national (500 mg·m-3) and international (300 mg·m-3) recommendations. The Royal Society of Health Advisory Group questionnaire about sick building syndrome was used to evaluate if there was a relationship between this high TVOCs concentration and the health of the workers. Several characteristic symptoms regarding irritation of the eyes and respiratory tract could be deduced from the responses. The results suggest that the poor air quality may be correlated to these symptoms but more detailed studies are necessary to establish a sound cause-effect relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a four-generational study of residents in three squatter communities (favelas) in Rio de Janeiro from 1968 to 2003. It shows how the marginalization of the urban poor has deepened over the past thirty-five years through drug-related violence, the failure of democracy to deliver on its promise of voice for the dis-enfranchised, the stigma of place and race, the increase in unemployment, and the inability to translate educational gains into concomitant income or occupational gains. Despite significant improvements in consumption of collective urban services, household goods, and schooling, few have been successful enough to move into "good neighborhoods" or into professional jobs. Gang violence creates a pervasive sense of fear and diminishes the social capital of the communities. Despite the promise of the ends of the dictatorship in 1984, favela residents feel they are more excluded. Yet they still have hope that their lives will improve in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the richness of the association between space, culture, and memory. It starts by indicating the importance of migration in the formation of Brazil and moves on to explore the relation between memory and space by showing how memories can be inscribed in the visible spatiality of a city. It goes briefly back to Marcel Proust's work in order to further suggest links between spatiality and remembrance. Finally Félix Guattari's notion of affect is used to account for the impact that spatial experiences may have upon us. The two spaces--previous and present--eventually superimpose forming a complex arrangement that conveys the idea of displacement. Throughout the article, selected, in-depth interviews with Italian and French immigrants who live in Rio de Janeiro--and who relate memories brought about by the experience of space--provide a lively and consistent background to the arguments proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]