Public Engagement

Community Resistance at the Urban Margins

Millions of people across the Global South live under the influence of non-state armed groups while facing socio-economic marginalization and limited access to public services. Despite such vulnerability and precarity, residents and civil society within these communities have developed creative strategies to navigate such contexts and advocate for development and justice. This project asks: How do urban communities mobilize to advocate for their well-being, dignity, rights, and justice? By integrating insights from political science, urban studies, sociology, and legal studies with the lived experiences of civil society leaders and residents, this collaborative project tackles this question through a novel comparison of marginalized neighborhoods across three major cities in the Global South: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Nairobi (Kenya), and Mexico City (Mexico).

Objectives

  1. Identify the conditions and mechanisms driving collective political and legal action in settings of violence and precarity
    • Document the advocacy, negotiation, and the defense of rights strategies that residents, community organizations, and local actors employ in the face of various forms of violence, exclusion, and state negligence.
    • Analyze how these individual and collective forms of political and legal action emerged.
    • Explain how and why such actions and behaviors are sustained or transformed over time.
  2. Highlight community-led and contextually relevant solutions
    • We focus our analytical and practical efforts on the most effective and innovative individual and collective actions.
    • This project seeks to learn from, emphasize, and further contribute to the enormous cultural and political creativity of these communities and spaces.
  3. Design actionable frameworks for civic engagement
    • Considering the participation of multiple civil society organizations and activists within this research group, we aim to create frameworks for:
      • practical and feasible political and legal actions that are transferable beyond the borders of the neighborhood case studies.
      • collaborative approaches that promote power-sharing and value different types of knowledge.

Maré from the Inside/Maré de Dentro

Maré from the Inside (Maré de Dentro) is an interactive visual and textual exhibit developed through the collaboration of Brazilian and U.S.-based artists, activists, and academics. It offers rarely captured views into the lives of residents in Complexo da Maré, a group of 16 contiguous favelas (informal and impoverished working-class neighborhoods) in Rio de Janeiro. Maré from the Inside is comprised of 45 family portraits, 50 street photographs, 4 interviews with select photographed families, and 3 documentary films. The exhibit demonstrates the diversity and creativity of the citizens of these communities while exposing the barriers favela residents confront in their everyday lives. In doing so, Maré from the Inside challenges long-standing and powerful stigmatizing narratives and suggests the need for a fresh set of political and cultural strategies capable of breaking the cycles of exclusion and marginalization experienced by favela communities. Click the links below to see photographs of the exhibit and check out the virtual exhibit here.

EDITED VOLUME

Maré from the Inside: Art, Culture and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, co-edited by Nicholas Barnes (University of St Andrews), Desirée Poets (Virginia Tech), and Max Stephenson Jr. (Virginia Tech), is a companion to the exhibition of the same name (Portuguese: Maré de Dentro). Maré from the Inside is published for the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance by Virginia Tech Publishing. In order to reach the widest possible readership, the book is available both as a freely downloadable PDF eBook and an affordable paperback edition. Information on both can be found at https://doi.org/10.21061/mare. The book is also available in Portuguese here.

ONLINE WRITING

MEDIA APPEARANCES