'Fare Money' Stories: Transportation and everyday practices in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro
Dates: | 25 February 2025 |
Times: | 15:00 - 16:30 |
What is it: | Seminar |
Organiser: | Manchester Urban Institute |
How much: | Free |
Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
Speaker: | Marcos Lopes Campos |
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This presentation contributes to ongoing debates on Southern urbanisms by arguing that taking money seriously - as a practical, moral and material issue and as an integral part of the production of infrastructures - can offer us new insights into the urban experience among the racialized poor in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore ‘fare money’ stories shared by poor black poets, revealing the ways they invent new socialities, ways of living and being, and reshape everyday formations of urban collective lives. To do so, I build an analytical framework through the path outlined by my ethnographic focus: establishing a dialogue with and juxtaposing urban infrastructure studies, southern urbanism theories, the socioanthropology of money and the anthropology of the house. I argue that the experience of obtaining transportation tickets among the racialized poor is necessarily a collective one. In their case, transportation usages are anything but stable or uniform. They involve transitory negotiations and calculated mobilization of relations, the conversion of money, moralities, timing and knowledge of infrastructural spatialities. Moreover, everyday practices to enact fare money engender values and order, positioning it as a materiality that mediates between the legal, illegal, formal and informal, all of which are intertwined in the production of infrastructures. This analysis reveals the quality of an urban experience that is persistently precarious, multifaceted and unstable. By offering the first ethnographic examination of how racialized poor people in a Brazilian city manage transportation costs in their daily lives, this presentation fills a significant gap in urban studies. Despite the pivotal role of public protests against transportation ticket increases in shaping Brazil’s recent democratic cycle, this topic remains underexplored. This research sheds new light on the intertwining of infrastructure, everyday livelihood, houses and differences in contemporary urban contexts.
Speaker
Marcos Lopes Campos
Biography: Marcos Campos is an interdisciplinary urban scholar and ethnographer. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), Brazil, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He also serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in São Paulo, Brazil, with support from a FAPESP Postdoctoral Scholarship. Marcos’ research spans a wide range of topics within Urban Studies, including public policy, urban political economy, infrastructures, futures, livelihoods, city-making, urban governance, illegal markets, and violence. His current research examines the relations between urban infrastructure, violence and accumulation through an ethnographic study of the discursive and material management of accidents and “extreme events” on Rio de Janeiro’s degraded metropolitan railway system.
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