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    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 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.


  • Published on

    Repertoires of hierarchy, inequality, and desire

    Brazil Inequality Publications Valued Difference

    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)

  • Published on

    Gender und Sexualität

    Inequality Publications Urban Politics

    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

  • Published on

    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 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.

  • Published on

    FocaalBlog: Care, cordiality, and control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil

    archive Brazil Inequality Politics
    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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    Techno-material entanglements and the social organisation of difference

    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