Paper short abstract:

Our talk addresses the waves of urban demonstrations taking place in Rio de Janeiro in 2013-2014 by looking at the economic underpinnings of the protest, it spatial dynamics and organizational structure.

Paper long abstract:

This talk addresses the waves of urban demonstrations taking place in Rio de Janeiro in 2013-2014 along three main theoretical dimensions. First, it looks at the relation between political activism and economic structures, including class relations, in which struggles are embedded. Second, it looks at the spatial dimension of the struggle, especially in relation to the big sports events which are taking place in the city, its gentrification and tradition of police violence. Thirdly, it addresses the organizational dynamic of protest, with particular the dialectic of horizontalism and verticalism. Our work engages with the tradition of labour studies, which looks at the dynamic of class formation, identity and consciousness through the lenses of ethnographic analysis.