Javier Auyero, “Notes Towards a Political Sociology of Urban Marginality: Where the Ambivalent State Meets Subsistence Strategies”, 05.05.2022, 5:30pm-7:15pm

Sciences Po, exclusively on Zoom (you will receive the link of this seminar after your registration), Compulsory Registration

Over the last few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have turned from analyzing the state’s neglect and abandonment into documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Yet, we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. In The Ambivalent State, Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering offer an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police agents and drug dealers in Argentina.

In this presentation, Javier Auyero examines the illicit relationships that link police forces and participants in the market of criminalized drugs, and describes the conditions of possibility of the “clandestine hands” of the state. After a summary of the research that gave origin to the book The Ambivalent State, Auyero will present original archival and ethnographic research on collusive relationships and on how/why these intersect and interact with poor people’s subsistence strategies.

Speaker

Javier Auyero is Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor at the Sociology Department, University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Patients of the State, and Contentious Lives. Together with Deborah Swistun, he published Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown and, with Fernanda Berti, In Harm’s Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence. He is the series editor of the Global/Comparative Ethnographies Series at Oxford University Press.

Discussion

Côme Salvaire, Associate Researcher, Sciences Po, Centre for International Studies (CERI)

Compulsory Registration

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr