2015/ 2016 Janey Annual Workshop: Valentina Abufhele and Douglas Piza
Monday May 9th // 12 pm 79 5th Ave between 15th St and 16th St. Room D 1618 (16th Floor)
Janey Fellows, Valentina Abufhele and Douglas Piza will be presenting their ongoing work based on the 2015/16 Janey Summer Fellowship they were awarded.
Valentina Abufhele:The State’s Poverty Trap. Or how the State’s attempt at overcoming informal settlements has failed
This report analyzes the last 25 years of housing policies (1990 – 2015) in Chile, as a means to observe the relationship between the State and poor residents’ organizations. I describe how these policies, programs and instruments have structured the relationship with poor populations, and with informal settlements especially, shaping them as subjects of government and intervention.
Based on State’s official documents and interviews with government agents, I propose to comprehend the last 25 years of housing policies as constituted according to three fundamental principles: (1) the main goal of the policy has been to provide access to housing for low income groups; (2) to accomplish this goal, the State has played essentially a subsidiary role; (3) closely related to subsidiarity, and due to scarce resources, the State has aimed at targeting social spending towards the poorest. Each of these principles—in short: access, subsidiarity and targeting—has followed a particular trajectory. I argue that the trajectories followed by these principles respond to conflicting logics, pointing to the particular Chilean contract between the State and poor populations brought about during the transition to democratic rule. Free-market oriented, yet strong social policies were the means through which the State attempted to restore democratic relationships with a popular mass that was to be excluded from fundamental decision-making about democracy.
Douglas Piza: The political economy of the border: Markets and the politics of privilege
This paper analyzes the emergence of the conditions for a re-export based triangle commerce system in the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este on the borders with Brazil. Based on archival research, interviews, and ethnographic observation, this paper seeks to genealogically analyze the origins, establishment and evolution of the fiscal legislation that shaped the emergence of this thriving border commerce in relation to the political and economic actors participating in the creation of this unique market. Thus I seek to contribute to the critique of the political economy of the border, locating the fiscal legislation within the broader intersection of a politics of privilege and an economy of illegalisms – an intersection encroached in the border zone as space of manipulation in face of the encounter between national economies and their different regulations. By looking at the fiscal legislation, my investigation reveals the understudied history of the trade regulation that brings into relief the state’s visible hand in the market. In doing so, my investigation does not partake in moral views of this market but rather shifts away from the predominant theoretical and conceptual frameworks to analyze it, namely the presupposition that markets like this emerge as a means for survival for the poor and in the absence of the state, leading to an informal economy. Inasmuch as my study reveals the political and economic stakes in the process of creating, enforcing, and changing the fiscal legislation that regulates the market in Ciudad del Este, it shows how markets are embedded not only in social but especially political contexts. Drawing from the Foucauldian literature on the differential management of illegalisms, I describe how law is vetted with power relation producing politics of privileges, and how selective interpretation of illegality leads to differential modulations of repression of popular markets not with the purpose of eliminating them, but of legitimizing new actors to capture the voluminous wealth circulating in these markets. Throughout the paper, I argue that taxation is an index of political subjectivation and structural violence, and look at its implications over time for the project of nation in Paraguay.