CEDLA Lecture | Politics of the urban periphery: Rethinking resident-state relations beyond citizenship in Latin America

Amsterdam : 20 September 2024 15:30-17:00.

Speaker: Martijn Koster, Wageningen University.

Discussant: Nanke Verloo, UvA.

In recent decades, citizenship has become a key concept to define relationships between marginalised populations and the state. The ways in which residents of urban peripheries position themselves in relation to the state, are often conceptualised as non-standard, for example as incomplete, informal, vulnerable, insurgent, or contentious citizenship. While these residents are marginalised by the state, theorisations of their politics still centre upon the state and its social contract. However, this does not resonate with their experiences and understandings of their relationship with the state. Moreover, for many marginalised urban residents, the political language of citizenship does not offer a solution to their daily predicament. In effect, existing theories risk contributing to epistemic injustice. In this lecture Martijn Koster will reconceptualise periphery-state interactions from the vantage point of the periphery. He approaches the variety of interactions between marginalised residents and the state as a politics of the periphery, a diverse politics in its own right and on its own terms that emerges from local modes of agency. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Recife, Brazil, and new research in Cuba and Colombia, Martijn Koster will discuss emic political and moral notions and images to better understand residents’ relationships with the state.

More informations HERE