We are pleased to announce our next OCE Research Seminar : Yuliya Shymko (Full Professor – Audencia Business School) will join us on March 28th to discuss her work :
“Living and organizing below the abyssal line: ethnography in the favelas”
Abstract :
In countries like Brazil, favela (slum) dwellers form survivalist communities, invisible and persistent spaces of radical exclusion and subjugation at the hands of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures of oppression. In this paper, we adopt a decolonial feminist perspective to reveal how the radically excluded respond to and organize themselves within colonial realm and without institutional protections.
Drawing from ‘the colonial difference’ framework developed by Maria Lugones and ‘the abyssal line’ concept introduced by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we conduct a longitudinal qualitative study of Ocupação Esperança (i.e., Occupation Hope), a favela situated in the outskirts of São Paulo. In our epistemic approach, we move beyond the traditional role of authoritative interpreters to one of fellow witnesses who examine, accentuate, and elucidate the struggles of subaltern groups to render them ontologically and epistemologically significant.
We reveal, primarily through the analysis of recorded, narrative interviews, field notes, and audio-visual materials, the evolution of community organizing below the abyssal line. We show how this evolution took place throughout time following dialectical shifts between vulnerability and solidarity. Our contributions are twofold. First, by taking a decolonial feminist perspective, we adopt an approach that is mindful of the continuing colonial difference of peripheral majorities vis-à-vis the metropolis. Second, we address recent calls for the de-colonization of knowledge production by rethinking issues of intersectionality and transnationalism which are important and relevant to organization studies in theorizing alternative organizing and the production of resisting subjectivities by the dispossessed.