Paper long abstract:

Urban settings may play a significant role in making practices of sociality among strangers generate public sphere on new problems and topics emerging from the world life. It is hardly a coincidence that certain urban civic groups set up public events including a variety of sociality practices in order to bring to the public attention (through the media action) new concerns and topics. I've ethnographically observed civic groups in Milan that organize these types of events and developed a comparison among them. The argument I'm proposing is that events of sociality among strangers generate more likely public sphere when they unfold in urban non- places whose identity is meant to be changed by the sociality practices that the events entail. Indeed, the contrast between the anonymity of non- places and the sociable practices that temporarily unfold in them turn the events in good news for the media discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Bilbao, Nowa Huta and the Black Country are former monoindustrial cities based on heavy industries (steelworks and shipbuilding). They were jewels of their own country: half of the Spanish ships were built in Bilbao for 200 years; the first industrial Revolution was born in the Black Country; Nowa Huta was one of the biggest combine and produced more than Americans steelworks. They built their culture and pride on these events/facts but the crises of mid-seventies destroyed them. Today they try to reinvent a new image and a new culture. In Bilbao, culture is liked with art thanks to Guggenheim Museum and local initiatives. The Black Country tries to become independent from Birmingham but has difficulties finding a second way of being in the map only on living museums. Nowa Huta is developing a new community on nature protection and try to not be just a suburb of Cracow.

Paper long abstract:

In 2000, Brazil produced around 230,000 tons of garbage per day. These numbers stand for the residues that are taken care of by the municipal sanitation services. There are also unofficial and improvised open air deposits of garbage all over the country.

With a starting point on the materiality of garbage, this paper examines the tension between policies of exclusion and struggles for participation in society. What is garbage and for whom? It looks particularly at the way female garbage scavengers in the city of Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil, are organizing themselves in movements and associations. As some seem to see garbage only as an abject and unwanted collateral effect of consumption, others seem to be using it as a source of survival and a way to claim social visibility.

Paper long abstract:

Within the disadvantaged region of Trancredo Novish, west Manaus, there is a constant battle between the Presbyterian Church and the gangs of the area for the recruitment of children. As a direct result of this battle the Little Disciples Project - an initiative to provide children in the area with a range of educational and emotional supports- was created. This paper, drawing from ongoing ethnographic research, aims to explore how the children of Trancredo both carve out a niche for themselves and exert a sense of agency over their lives through their use of the Little Disciples Project. I argue that through the changes in both the physical and moral landscape of the area as a result of the establishment of the Project, the children are able to negotiate their life paths and change how certain members of both the upper and lower echelons of Amazonian society view them.