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Afinando as diferenças na chegada à cidade: repertórios sensoriais de migrantes internacionais no Rio de Janeiro

Fine-tuning differences upon arrival in the city: sensorial repertoires of international migrants in Rio de Janeiro


forthcoming in Tomo


Resumo

Migrantes internacionais que chegam à cidade desigual do Rio de Janeiro se deparam com diferenças e hierarquias étnico-raciais, de classe e gênero, que constituem a paisagem urbana e os corpos que nela circulam. A etnografia com migrantes senegaleses e espanhóis chegados na década de 2010 analisa como estes se envolveram de forma diferenciada com as atmosferas afetivas e estéticas coletivas proporcionadas pelos espaços urbanos e seus habitantes. A partir de uma abordagem fenomenológica e crítica, os registros urbanos visuais estão concebidos como parte de repertórios sensoriais. Ao analisar os repertórios sensoriais emergentes das trajetórias locais e transnacionais dos migrantes, o artigo revela como os recém-chegados se sintonizam nas densas paisagens urbanas e nas contradições e contingências entre experiências e sensibilidades, oriundas de privilégio e racismo, medo e curiosidade. A heterogeneidade dos repertórios dos migrantes reflete e co-constitui esse mundo urbano denso, multifacetado e desafiador.


Abstract

International migrants arriving in the unequal city of Rio de Janeiro encounter ethno-racial, class and gender differences and hierarchies that shape the urban landscape and the bodies that circulate within it. This ethnography with Senegalese and Spanish migrants who arrived in the 2010s analyses how they engaged differently with the affective atmospheres and collective aesthetics own to urban spaces and their inhabitants. Within a critical phenomenology, visual registers are conceived as part of sensory repertoires. By analysing the sensory repertoires emerging from the local and transnational trajectories of newly arrived migrants, the article reveals how newcomers tune into dense urban landscapes and the contradictions and contingencies between experiences and sensibilities, arising from privilege and racism, fear and curiosity. The heterogeneity of migrants' repertoires reflects and co-constitutes this dense, multifaceted, and challenging urban world.

 

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Recently, Laura Lamas Abraia pushed all workshop participants to think  about the possibility to conceive of the drawing as concept. I am not  sure how to get there yet, but when asked to include images in a recent  article on the sensory attunement to the city, I met once more the  challenge of how to do justice to my ethical impetus of wanting to  respect the privacy of my interlocutors and the wish to show with more  than words what happens on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Scene of a street sale in Rio as a pencil sketch.

Drawing as concept

From this resulted my first sketch of a street vending situation. Of course, it is far from a concept. But still, a beginning.


Let's see if it will find the light of the day in publishing.


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Repertoires of hierarchy, inequality, and desire: Experiencing Rio de Janeiro upon arrival

forthcoming in July 2026

International Sociology


Abstract

How do newcomers to Rio de Janeiro engage with difference and inequality in the urban landscape and the bodies circulating within it? In the 2010s, recently arrived Senegalese and Spaniards unevenly engaged with the affective atmospheres and collective aesthetics which urban spaces and their inhabitants afforded. Combining critical phenomenology and performativity, I conceive of repertoire as the conceptual lens to account for the newcomers’ struggles with and specific ways of relating to the countless hierarchies that pervade urban life. More specifically, their sensorial repertoires articulate how newcomers attune to dense urban landscapes mediated by their embodied experience that ranges from privilege and racism to desire and fear. In sensorial repertoires, newcomers continuously modulate the racial, gendered, and classed reifications and prejudice which they situate within transnational and local trajectories. More broadly, repertoires echo and co-constitute the challenging everyday of dense, unequal, and multifaceted urban worlds.


link to fulltext when available via LIRIAS (KU Leuven)

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Gender und Sexualität

-English below-


2027, forthcoming, in Handbuch Stadtanthropologie, Springer


Zusammenfassung

Stadträume sind weitgehend und meist implizit gegendert, wobei sie auch das Verständnis von Gender und Sexualität prägen. Welche städtischen Sozialitäten und Materialitäten rücken in den Blick, wenn Gender und Sexualität und andere Differenzkategorien in der stadtethnologischen Forschung zentral werden? Zunächst werden Gender und Sexualität im städtischen Raum kontextualisiert, danach wichtige Erkenntnisse aus deren Zusammenspiel mit anderen Differenzkategorien diskutiert, bevor neue epistemologische Horizonte für städtische Infrastrukturen und Natur eröffnet werden.


Schlüsselbegriffe

Gender, Sex, Sexualität, queer, trans, Intersektionalität, Macht, Verlangen, urbane Natur, Infrastruktur


Gender and Sexuality


Abstract

Urban spaces are largely and mostly implicitly gendered, whilst they also shape the understanding of gender and sexuality. Which urban socialities and materialities come into focus when gender, sexuality and other categories of difference take centre stage in urban anthropological research? Firstly, I contextualise gender and sexuality within the urban space, I then discuss key insights arising from their interaction with other categories of difference, before opening up new epistemological horizons for urban infrastructures and nature.


Keywords

Gender, sex, sexuality, queer, trans, intersectionality, power, desire, urban nature, infrastructure

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Diálogos sociopolíticos sobre convivialidades urbanas a partir das cidades latino-americanas

-English below-


Resumo

Convivialidades urbanas na América Latina provocam diálogos e debates sociopolíticos relevantes acerca do mundo contemporâneo. Os processos urbanos são um terreno fértil para compreender a coconstituição entre convivialidade e desigualdade. Eles nos permitem abordar a díade convivialidade-desigualdade como um repertório analítico compartilhado para pensar a vida urbana contemporânea e suas formas de coabitação, sensíveis tanto a assimetrias, limites e clivagens, bem como a colaborações, negociações e conflitos entre agentes humanos, não humanos e mais que humanos na definição e na produção do mundo urbano comum, disputado, descontínuo e desigual. Os processos urbanos latino-americanos e suas especificidades nos oferecem elementos para elaborar comparações translocais. Assim, a partir da América Latina, surgem contribuições para teorias sociais e para debates políticos que circulam globalmente.


forthcoming as

Heil, Tilmann, Ramiro Segura, and Bianca Tavolari. 2026. “Diálogos sociopolíticos sobre convivialidades urbanas a partir das cidades latino-americanas.” Pp. 9–26 in Convivialidades urbanas: debates sociopolíticos a partir da América Latina, Coleção Convivialidade em Disputa, edited by T. Heil, R. Segura, and B. Tavolari. São Paulo: Hucitec.



Sociopolitical dialogues on urban convivialities grounded in Latin American cities



Abstract

Urban convivialities in Latin America give rise to significant sociopolitical dialogues and debates concerning the contemporary world. Urban processes provide fertile ground for understanding the co-constitution of conviviality and inequality. They allow us to approach the conviviality-inequality dyad as a shared analytical framework for thinking about contemporary urban life and its forms of cohabitation, sensitive both to asymmetries, limits and cleavages, as well as to collaborations, negotiations and conflicts. Human, non-human and more-than-human agents together shape the common, contested, discontinuous and unequal urban world. Latin American urban processes and their specificities provide rich ethnographies to spark translocal comparisons and conceptual insights. We introduce the contributions to social theories and political debates that emerge from Latin America and circulate globally.

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Image description

Susana Durão and I just published a FocaalBlog as a teaser to our work on the forgotten urban archive of staffed entry halls and porter's lodges, in our case Brazil. It's fascinating to go after what we can know by understanding the social, material, and affectionate relations in this transitory space. Much more than security, porters also provide care alongside cordiality and control.


link


This post is part of a Feature organized by Tessa Diphoorn and Tomas Salem on Sensing (in)Security. Check out all the contributions and their introduction here.


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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.
Drawing as concept

Drawing as concept

Recently, Laura Lamas Abraia pushed all workshop participants to think about the possibility to conceive of the drawing as concept. I am not sure how to get there yet, but when asked to include images...

Sociopolitical dialogues on urban convivialities

Sociopolitical dialogues on urban convivialities

Diálogos sociopolíticos sobre convivialidades urbanas a partir das cidades latino-americanas -English below- Resumo Convivialidades urbanas na América Latina provocam diálogos e debates sociopolíticos...

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...