Seminário CRIA: “Exploring contradictory politics of displacement: São Paulo’s humanitarianism and occupy movements”, por Heike Drotbohm (Department of Anthropology and African Studies Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz)

Abstract

In the Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo multiple types of poor and mobile populations share the need for shelter, legal protection and the access to social rights. Migrants and refugees, who currently reach the city in their search for a better place of living, have to interpret the city’s networks and institutions, their logics of differentiation as well as their own position vis-à-vis other vulnerable groups. In my talk I will concentrate on the notion of displacement, which is currently employed both in the field of humanitarian aid as well as by occupy movements, who put it at the center of their social, legal and public acts of resistance. As I intend to show, the term and its political implications prove to be contradictory for people who have experienced dispossession and are asked to join the fight against neoliberal modes of property.