Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins

Extreme inequalities, uneven planning, and unruly environments have long shaped individual and collective subjectivities at Latin America’s urban margins. Yet these same margins have frequently given rise to new forms of community organization, cultural practice, and social mobilization. This volumeframes the urban margins as complex and multi-layered sites where ongoing translocal histories of exploitation and marginalization meet distinctly local and interpersonal forms of sociability, subjective belonging, and political agency. Through nuanced ethnographic work and cross-disciplinary theoretical insights, Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins unpacks this complexity, investigating how margins are upheld, negotiated, and challenged.

Moisés Kopper is Research Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, and Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant ＂Informational Citizenship: Toward a Global Ethnography of Practices and Infrastructures of Datafication in the Global South.＂ He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. He recently authored Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil’s Public Housing (University of Michigan Press, 2022).