Nicole Rosner

Presentation by Nicole Rosner (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation)

Over the past three decades, scholars have studied everyday forms of violence in the peripheries of Brazilian cities to expose a critical disjunction between the formal structures of democracy and the realities of contemporary urban life. Today, Brazil is facing a new political transformation: the rise of a radical right-wing movement that openly threatens democratic structures and glorifies the violent “order” of the former military dictatorship. In this talk, I draw from over 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork that preceded this radical political shift to investigate the unmaking of democracy through the remaking of the city. I do so by examining the lived experience of green city-making in two different working-class peripheries. I show that while these public works projects symbolically democratize the city by investing in working-class green space, housing and services, they in fact demonstrate the dismantling of the very democratic project that made them possible.

Nicole Rosner a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Chicago Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and a Postdoctoral Scholar affiliated with the UChicago Department of Anthropology. Her research concerns the everyday politics of city-making and the violent reproduction of social, spatial, and racial inequality. Her regional interests lie in Latin America, particularly Brazil. Her doctoral dissertation draws on ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to investigate divergent political reactions to the unfinished work of urbanizing, securing and greening Rio’s working-class communities. She examines how the lived experience of urban renewal in Rio’s poor peripheries over the past decade illuminates the contemporary erosion of liberal democracy in Brazil. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled: Remaking the City, Unmaking Democracy: The Afterlives of Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro. Nicole’s research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Inter-American Development Foundation (IAF), the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship; Global Metropolitan Studies Fellowship, the Stanley Brandes Grant for Ethnographic Field Research, and the Center for Latin American Studies Tinker Grant at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies, her MSc in City Design and Social Sciences from the London School of Economics, and her B.A. from Harvard University with honors.