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At the start of my PhD, Steven Vertovec shared his ideas about his conceptual triangle - Configurations, Representations, Encounters. It was intriguing. Even better to see it published as his take on the social organization of difference in Ethnic and Racial Studies. The best is, though, to critically review and extend it with my colleagues Fran Meissner and Nikolaus Vertovec. We went in two crucial dimensions: the technical and the material to take account of the longue durée of difference that is always also unequal, cast in hierarchies, especially in cities. I am looking forward to where this think piece goes. 

Abstract:
Vertovec’s social organisation of difference framework links three research areas. They study difference and its social importance: encounters, representations, and structural configurations. This paper argues for an expansion of the framework. It should recognise that those three domains are co-constituted and mediated by technical transformations and material sedimentations. An expanded focus is vital to address old and new inequalities. While Vertovec’s original framework paid limited attention to techno-material entanglements, we highlight their importance. The material and the technical matter at the intersections of encounters, representations, and configurations. Where possible, we point to examples. We thus call for more research and cross-disciplinary dialogue beyond the social sciences. We re-emphasise the framework’s usefulness for this and for engaging with (urban) complexities and difference. As a think-piece, the article shows the benefits of nuancing Vertovec’s framework by considering the technical and material.

Full text
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Done.

The German academic world is sometimes particular, despite having some resemblance in other parts of the world, for example, São Paulo. After your doctorate, you continue on precarious contracts - other than the few who pass directly onto Junior professorships - and start preparing a second project. It needs to be distinct from your doctoral research. In Anthropology, this refers to both regional and thematic/conceptual expertise.

While in the midst of writing my second book, my colleagues at Cologne University convinced me last year that this further seal of academic excellence and loyalty to a peer group would not do harm. I embarked on submitting 6 peer-reviewed, article-length text that show an internal coherence, wrote a long introduction on Assembling Social Hierarchies, submitted all to the faculty and four reviewers, received positive verdicts. The faculty followed the recommendation of the reviewers and invited me to submit yet another three different topics for my oral habilitation colloquium, open to the faculty and with the necessary participation of 24 full and associate professors.

I had the pleasure to present a new research idea on Urban wood/s to sixty interested and enthusiastic colleagues and students. If the faculty next Wednesday follows the unanimous recommendation to also accept that oral habilitation exam, I will have reached what they call the end of the ladder. Done.

An inaugural lecture will follow, and hopefully soon the second book as well.
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Entanglements and frictions of legal pluralism, multinormativity and conviviality

With my colleagues, Samuel Barbosa and Osvaldo Barreneche, we just published the edited volume on normative multiplicity with CLACSO.

Link

The book is a multilingual exploration with a co-written introduction in English and Spanish as well as contributions in Portuguese, Spanish and English. In two parts, the book discusses the conceptual entanglements of legal pluralism, multinormativity and conviviality and empirical case studies from across Latin America in different historical moments.

I personally discuss how multinormativity dialogues with the anthropological debate on everyday ethics and how this influences the ability to judge and form ones one self as newcomers in Rio de Janeiro. Read more.
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I just published a short research provocation in Nature Cities in the section "I and the city" on one of the most fascinating urban archives that exists: entry halls and their staff.


The article is the back cover of the current issue of the journal and you can read it here.


Enjoy!


Abstract

Maintaining one’s reputation is a central concern in Latin American cities, and the doormen of buildings have a crucial part to play. Tilmann Heil delves deeper into the intricate dynamics of Rio de Janeiro’s entry halls and highlights how they operate as urban microcosms in which reputation, security and care materialize across structural inequality.

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Um suspiro das mulheres espanholas em relação aos homens cariocas

PT:
Este capítulo aborda etnograficamente o dilema vivido por mulheres espanholas heterossexuais e liberadas que constroem uma relação de solidariedade com grupos queer no Rio de Janeiro mas expressam sentimentos de heteromelancolia. Aparentemente contra sua vontade, elas relatam momentos de tristeza quanto à queerização da população masculina do Rio de Janeiro naquilo que é, para elas, um processo crescente. Em diálogo com os comentários delas sobre esses encontros, registrados entre 2014 e 2020, ofereço percepções etnográficas sobre sua experiência distinta de diferença interseccional e conexão parcial com pessoas queer. Essas relações foram ofuscadas pela heteromelancolia que advém das tensões entre a liberação feminista/queer e o desejo heteronormativo.
fulltext

Hetero-melancholia in Rio de Janeiro

A sigh of Spanish women in relation to local men

EN:
This chapter ethnographically engages with the conundrum experienced by straight liberated Spanish women who encounter in solidarity with queer people in Rio de Janeiro but express their feelings of hetero-melancholia. Seemingly against their will, they conveyed moments of sadness in face of the queering of Rio de Janeiro’s male population, to them, an advancing process. Engaging with the commentaries on such encounters, recorded between 2014 and 2020, I offer ethnographic insights into their distinct experience of intersectional difference from, and partial connection with, queer people. These relations were overshadowed by hetero-melancholia, born out of the tensions between feminist/queer liberation and heteronormative desire.

Please get in touch if you would like to read an English version of this paper.
in: Sarah Albiez-Wieck, Silke Hensel, Holger M. Meding and Katharina Schembs (eds.) Género en América Latina: Homenaje a Barbara Potthast, 443-465. Madrid, Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert.
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In this paper, I ask whether and how the assembling of social hierarchies in the everyday of urban newcomers can be conceptualised. In my ethnographic work with Senegalese and Spanish in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, I have been interested in the unexpected and multiple stories and materialities of the city as they unfold upon arrival. Assemblage thinking – the meshing together of urban components so that they work well together– has an edge over other approaches to account for a multiplicity of urban worlds in the making. At the same time, assemblages have been critiqued for being overly horizontal, unable to capture inequality and hierarchy. Inequality and hierarchy, however, are constitutive of Rio de Janeiro as is the case for most contemporary urban configurations. In Rio de Janeiro, newcomers continuously evaluate multiple and intersecting differences in countless and often ambiguous ways. Newcomers perceive, question, position themselves in relation to, and re-assemble urban hierarchies in known and new ways. These sensory, reflexive, and material constitutions of valued difference are crucial to the worlds that unfold in an unequal city. I will ground this productive conceptual tension in selected vignettes of the fragmented urban trajectories of newcomers in Rio de Janeiro that compose my emerging ethnography. I invite the seminar participants to joining my quest of how to best comprehend such an assembling of social hierarchies through concepts that may travel to facilitate comparison.
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I am glad to organize this interdisciplinary panel with Clara Ruvituso, Ramiro Segura and Astrid Ulloa from Mecila! Consider submitting your work:


Interdisciplinary Panel

07.09 Latin America under the Conviviality-Inequality lens: Current scenarios and possible futures of living together 

at the

Congreso Internacional del Consejo Europeo de Investigaciones Sociales de América Latina (CEISAL)

13-15 June 2022 in Helskinki, Finland


Abstract

This panel invites contributions that discuss the current scenarios and possible futures in Latin America under the lens of Conviviality-Inequality. In the last years, Conviviality-Inequality studies developed a focus on Latin America, initiating productive dialogue with Latin American social thought, otherwise often displaced to the margins of global knowledge circulation, where it dwells together with postcolonial studies, the critiques of anthropocentrism, and further critical theories of the other "souths" and "norths". The panel aims to go beyond established conceptions of coloniality and modernity, globality and locality, or parallel notions that present all too simple binaries, juxtapositions, and closures.

Multiple and intersecting social, political, and material regimes have shaped Latin American territorialities. They have emerged from the confluence and entanglement of colonial and imperialist, as well as modern and developmentalist globalizing forces and their contestations. These regimes shape time-spaces of different scales, from the global to the local, from the event to long durée. The paired concept Conviviality-Inequality captures the co-existence of ever-changing configurations of these multiple processes and their spatializations. While conviviality theoretically encompasses the spectrum from conflict to peace, its conceptual marriage to inequality hones in on the hierarchical, unequal historical condition, in Latin America and beyond. Current debates of zumbification, aquilombar, buen vivir, and ways of rethinking creolization, mestizaje, négritude, imperialism, and ancestral knowledge explore the convivial configurations of the Latin American pasts, presents, and futures. They take the interdependent inequalities and differences into account (among others, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, citizenship, human/more-than-human) as

well as the countless forms of resistance and contestation that have arisen in the region. Attention to such configurations brings onto-epistemological openings to the forefront: spatialities, temporalities, colonialities, and modernities are all constituted in the plural.

Within the rapidly changing global scenario of both global social movements, such as “Vidas negras importam”, “Estallido social”, “Fridays for Future”, and the Covid-19 pandemic, Conviviality-Inequality opens a novel and productive opportunity for analysis given its focus on specific tensions at local and global levels, between inequality and differences, and their contestations. Papers should empirically explore concrete examples of Conviviality-Inequality, making use of the full spectrum of onto-epistemological, material, and symbolic plurality. Beyond the debates addressed so far, some such examples: the re-emergence of State power from urban centers to national borders, from the intimate community to the geopolitical scale; the salience of less-regarded categories of difference, such as age, dis/ability, or legal status in interaction that unfold in the configuration of race, class, and gender; the reconfiguring and diverse contestations in relation to the body, nature, or the non-human; the tensions, inequalities, and opportunities of the digital transformation and social media in knowledge circulation. Based on empirical reflections of the current conjuncture, we would like to discuss what kinds of convivial scenarios and futures become possible and conceivable in Latin America when the pluralities, synergies, tensions, interconnections, and contradictions are fully explored to address both continuities and change.


Practical Information

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A strategic forum for Brazilianists

Result of the VII International Symposium on the history and culture of Brazil "Struggles for freedom in 200 years of an independent Brazil" (Simpósio Internacional de História e Cultura do Brasil: Lutas por liberdade em 200 anos de Brasil independente) has resulted this beautiful open access publications from across the humanities and social sciences.

It reminds us of how important it is to maintain freedom and the creativity of thought to actively engage with the politics and poetics of a complex world such as that which is unfolding in the time-space that is today commonly named "Brasil".

I have contributed with a reflection on aspects of Otherness that derives from current migrations to Brazil. Enjoy the read!
TABLE OF CONTENT OF THE ISSUE OF BRÉSIL(S):
https://doi.org/10.4000/bresils.8557

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It's a long journey that comes to an end as an #openaccess article in IJURR (doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12963).

I was fascinated how newcomers make the city according to their tastes, needs, visions, and projects weaving threads together that have not been connected before. I focus on the action of interweaving - or agencer - in which they connect themselves and their collective forms of organization to religious, social, political and material elements of urban space. First and foremost, I thank my interlocutors with whom I learned about the multiple Rios that emerge from complex lives lived in the multiple tensions in place.

The article sheds light onto the process of arrival that is at the basis of my project Valued Difference that I have developed over the last years in Rio de Janeiro, on which you can read here.
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I will be presenting at the 9th roundtable on "Identities and Alterities" of this international symposium that honors the struggles for freedom in 200 years of an independent Brazil. I will discuss some of the current alterities in Brazli that arise from the recent arrival of West Africans and Southern Europeans in the city of Rio de Janeiro. I will discuss notions of Africanness and Europeanness in my interlocutors' narratives and experiences in Rio de Janeiro and how this discussion facilitates an understanding of some of the complexities of historically grown, currently active social hierarchies and racism in the city.
Missed it? Please go and listen to our debate here!
Published on
in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR)
Early View, pdf

Abstract
This article reveals how newcomers weave their own threads into the fabric of urban infrastructure. Entangling their own with other urban assemblages, newcomers generate multi‐layered dynamics situationally in order to render possible the lives to which they aspire. They forge openings where there seemed none before and keep negative potentialities in check. To offer an ethnography of how the Senegalese presence in Rio de Janeiro has grown dynamically between 2014 and 2019, I draw analytical strength from the double meaning of agencement: the action of interweaving varied socio‐material components--agencer--so that they work together well, and the resulting assemblage of social and material components. Two case studies act as a starting point: how Senegalese came to inhabit an urban architectural landmark and how they regularize their residence status. Their transformative power of city‐making is generated both through the mutual intertwining of a dahira, a religious group of Senegalese migrants, and a diasporic Senegalese association and through the ways in which the Senegalese interweave themselves and their institutionalized collective forms with ever more socio‐material components of the urban space. Beyond the better‐known transnational embeddedness of the Senegalese, their complex infrastructuring practices upon arrival become constitutive of new urban realities, moulding the city fabric of which they are becoming part.
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in International Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies
accepted

Abstract
Given the renewed arrival of Spanish migrants in Brazil since 2008, I analyse how post/colonial power relations are re/configured and contradictions produced when legal and economic precarity question status hierarchies based on origin, race, and class. Brazil currently hosts the largest number of illegalised Spaniards worldwide. Illegality and precarity contest the favourable effects of nearly unconditional whiteness in Brazil and globally racialised, colonial power hierarchies. Derived from 2.5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, my interlocutors’ trajectories show how they struggle with and embrace the urban fabric and its structural post/colonial configuration.


Keywords
Brazil, postcolonial, whiteness, Europeanness, precarity, coloniality, status, hierarchy

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Três debates do meu livro em lançamento

I: Museu Nacional, Horto Botânico, Quinta da Boa Vista, s/n - São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro
12 de março 2020, 9:30 horas
com os debatedores
Joana Bahia, Professora titular, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
El Hadji Diallo, Jornalista e tradutor independente
Charles P. Gomes, Pesquisador, Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa
 
II: Núcleo interdisciplinar de Estudos Migratórios, IPPUR, UFRJ, Rua da Lapa 120 / 204
13 de março 2020, 17:00 horas
com a debatedora
Miriam de Oliveira Santos, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro

III. Centro de Estudos Africanos, Universidade de São Paulo, USP
Sala 08, Avenida Luciano Gualberto 315
16 de março 2020, 15:00 horas
com os debatedores
Alexander Yao Cobbinah, USP
Luciane Scarato, Universidade de Colônia e Mecila/Cebrap


Sumário do livro
Em um mundo onde a diferença é muitas vezes vista como uma ameaça ou desafio, o livro explora como as pessoas realmente vivem em sociedades diversas. Baseado numa etnografia a longo prazo de africanos ocidentais, tanto no Senegal como na Espanha, este livro propõe que a convivialidade é um compromisso com a diferença entre etnias, línguas, religiões e práticas.

Tilmann Heil reúne histórias de longa data, projetos políticos e práticas cotidianas de viver com a diferença. Com foco na vida de bairros em Casamança, Senegal e Catalunha, Espanha - duas regiões igualmente complexas - o livro mostra como os senegaleses negociam e traduzem com habilidade os meandros da diferença e do poder. Nestes mundos africanos e europeus vividos, a convivialidade é sempre temporária e em transformação.

Este livro oferece uma leitura texturizada, realista, porém esperançosa, da diferença, da mudança social, do poder e do respeito.
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As a key part of my research for the book Comparing Conviviality, I reflect on the differences between me and my interlocutors, my privilege and the commonalities we identified and challenges we faced. The relations we forged throughout the research process and beyond materialized at the intersection of race, origin, class, world view and outlook, among others.
Impressions from the presentation and debate of Comparing Conviviality at the Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Estudos Migratórios (NIEM), IPPUR, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in March 2020.

The sound at the beginning and end are from ZigFest in 2010 in Ziguinchor, Senegal which I discuss in Chapter 4: Staged and sensous.

If ever you do not have access to the book through your institution, please get in touch.
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The book Comparing Conviviality takes the claim to a better knowledge and practice of how to live with difference foreward that Senegalese migrants in Catalonia made. Pursuing such non-hegemonic knowledge during 18-month of multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain, this quest has led to the formulation of an unstable concept: conviviality.
Impressions from the presentation and debate of Comparing Conviviality at the Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Estudos Migratórios (NIEM), IPPUR, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in March 2020.

The sound at the beginning and end are from ZigFest in 2010 in Ziguinchor, Senegal which I discuss in Chapter 4: Staged and sensous.

If ever you do not have access to the book through your institution, please get in touch.
Habilitation / Livre docente

Habilitation / Livre docente

Done. The German academic world is sometimes particular, despite having some resemblance in other parts of the world, for example, São Paulo. After your doctorate, you continue on precarious contracts...

Events Inequality Wood
Normative multiplicity (CLACSO, 2024)

Normative multiplicity (CLACSO, 2024)

Entanglements and frictions of legal pluralism, multinormativity and conviviality With my colleagues, Samuel Barbosa and Osvaldo Barreneche, we just published the edited volume on normative multiplicity...

About doorman and what they don't say

About doorman and what they don't say

I just published a short research provocation in Nature Cities in the section "I and the city" on one of the most fascinating urban archives that exists: entry halls and their staff. The article is the...

Heteromelancolia no Rio de Janeiro

Heteromelancolia no Rio de Janeiro

Um suspiro das mulheres espanholas em relação aos homens cariocas PT: Este capítulo aborda etnograficamente o dilema vivido por mulheres espanholas heterossexuais e liberadas que constroem uma relação...

Honoured: Hommage à la Casa de Rui Barbosa

Honoured: Hommage à la Casa de Rui Barbosa

A strategic forum for Brazilianists Result of the VII International Symposium on the history and culture of Brazil "Struggles for freedom in 200 years of an independent Brazil" (Simpósio Internacional...