Fun with abstracts

So the date to submit paper proposals for LASA 2009 was yesterday (Latin American Studies Association Conference – this one in Rio de Janeiro, currently Dengue Fever capital). As I am still floundering about the city with the shreds of a research question stuck to the soles of my sneakers, I of course have no idea what my paper for this might actually entail.

But as I am totally pumped at the prospect of going to Rio (and who wouldn’t be?) - I did what I normally do when under the gun to write up a proposal: screw any sense of what a person in my position is capable of researching and make outlandish and unfounded claims about what I intend to prove. When caught with your pants down, you might as well put on a show, no?

Here is the write-up. Notice the complete lack of any methodology, scientific objectivity, or claim to evidence. But in my defense, LASA only allows a 50-70 word paper description so there is really no space for all of that. (For anyone familiar with it, you can also notice the heavy influence of Charles Tilly’s essay War Making and State Making as Organized Crime. You can thank Bo for that lead.)

Title of Proposed Paper: Of Democracy and Discipline: The Logic of Government Engagement in the Slums of São Paulo

Description of Paper: In this paper I attempt to explain the seemingly contradictory involvement of the Brazilian state in urban squatter communities (favelas) in the present day. On the one hand, the Brazilian state has dropped dictatorship-era expulsion strategies and is now spending millions of dollars on research and upgrading programs to improve favela quality of life. On the other hand, the state continues to tacitly support the use of indiscriminate and excessive police violence in these same communities, with police killings rising sharply in the post-authoritarian period. I argue that this seemingly contradictory approach is actually a rational carrot and stick strategy to subdue favelas and bring them under state control. The ultimate aim of this strategy is to protect elite citizen's material interests from the underclass, hence the sticks, but it is tempered by the constraints that democratic electoral politics place on elite action. These constraints have caused the mutation of broad state violence into individual instances of police brutality and the new reliance on carrots to purchase favela acquiescence to state sovereignty.

And if all this wasn’t enough, I turned the beast in a day late because of continued internet access problems. Thankfully it’s not the German Studies Association conference, so I hope I’ll be OK.