Dear Prospective Applicant

The Study Abroad Office, DePaul University  is planning a short term summer program to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador to explore the relationship between the process of globalization and Brazilian cities. Two course will be offered by Professor Fassil Demissie (Public Policy Studies) and Professor Robert Adams (International Studies). The program is schedule to be offered in the summer of 2009.

The proposed Study Abroad Program focuses on examining how people make urban life meaningful in cultural and social terms in the globalizing cities of Brazil.  The two courses explore the following questions: How do people create a sense of place, of community, and urban identity? What are the historical and socio-cultural contexts that frame opportunities, constraints and uncertainties of urban life? What sort of cultural resources do people use to mediate the social and economic changes brought about by globalization? How do local governments and grassroot community organizations respond to the austerity programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank? What institutional mechanisms have been developed by local, regional and national governments to cope with the unprecedented urban growth? What forms of solidarity, social knowledge and spaces of hope are being carved out by community organizations to improve the conditions of poor people who live in these cities?

In addressing these and other questions, the Study Aboard Program to Brazil explores the ways in which anthropologists and urbanists deploy the concepts of culture and urban life in order to understand the lived experiences of people in these cities.   We will also examine how issues of social identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationalism and citizenship, family and religious affiliations deeply impact the ways in which people negotiate the material and social world of their lived experiences. In each city, we will grapple with structural inequality, institutional constraints, social conflict, urban solidarity, as well as social and cultural productions that are embedded in specific historical and political contexts.  Our study of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador and the social and cultural change brought by globalization pays particular attention to the intersection of culture, power, identity, grassroot mobilization and the lived experience of people who are caught in the global web of new forms of urbanity that scholars have now identified as a distinct kind of polynucleated and fragmented urban form of  “postmodern urbanism”. This particular form of urbanism also involves a contest  over the use of urban space, particularly in regards to who belongs where and with what entitlements or citizenship rights.

Course Description

PPS 397:  Globalizing Cities and New Forms of Urbanity: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador (Fassil Demissie) Transnational processes, whether seen as an institutional or as discursive practice, have fundamentally challenged not only nation states, but also the fortune of cities and regions around the world. Global cities are the vortex through which the circulation of capital, commodities, images, and people constantly circulate; often in discrete phases consisting of short and concentrated bursts characteristic of the global economy.  The course emphasizes the centrality of globalizing cities as strategic sites for the repositioning of cities within nation-states and across the globe. These cities simultaneously function as the cauldron for new forms of urbanity as well as local sites where diverse social and cultural geographies collide and mix in the highly charged symbolic spaces associated with the present phase of globalization.

The course also examines the analytic terrain of global cities beyond the geographical circuit of North American and European cities, and interrogates various aspects of globalizing cities in the South in general, and Brazil in particular. It focuses on the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador as specific case studies for examining new forms of urbanity. In addition, the course also explores the role of social movements of the poor, and the particular forms of agency embedded in the social and material realities of every day life in these cities.