Between Takes and Edits: media-activism against the terror politics in Brazil

Drawing on my research covering the struggles of Vila Autódromo, a small favela in Rio de Janeiro
threatened with removal in the 1990s, I aim to expand my investigation into how new media
technologies can change and reshape political participation in contemporary times. The mediums of
video and photography and also the Internet shaped Vila Autódromo's politics of resistance and our
collaboration methods to produce impactful audiovisual materials not only for the online campaigns
against eviction, but also for our defence material in the public civil suits. The mainstream media has
long been used as a weapon of marginalisation and discrimination, depicting black and low-income
populations through stereotyping in films and television, but the people of Vila Autódromo were able to
use it to their advantage to empower themselves and overturn such images and narratives.

The story of Vila Autódromo echoes that of many other communities in Brazil and worldwide who have
fought against ethnic, racial and social cleansing, and even cultural and physical genocide. The political
rifts and opposing moral positions of those who wanted the evictions/demolitions and those who were
fighting them, with the constantly shifting battle lines, will resonate not only with other places going
through similar struggles worldwide, but also other urban struggles against capitalist expansion. The
pervasiveness of the city's actions - analysed through the urban expulsions in Rio - mirrors other subtle
forms of authoritarianism, which seem to be rising exponentially in the current times.

In my future publications and research activities, my aim is to widen the focus by exploring how forced
evictions and expropriations have been taking place worldwide under different social and political
circumstances as part of a global phenomenon of urban expulsion driven by neo-liberal capitalist
expansion.

The impact on the countries of the so-called Global South is far more severe given the daily struggle of
many parts of society to put bread on their tables and keep a roof over their heads. In the case of Brazil,
democracy has always worked selectively upon different populations. Since the redemocratisation of the
country in the mid-1980s, the number of racialised killings, the so-called 'genocide against urban black
populations', has increased, along with the number of homicides targeting rural, indigenous and quilombola
communities struggling for survival and the preservation of their lands. Furthermore, the limited access to
public health, security, education, culture, urban mobility and employment demonstrates the gross
inequality among the different social classes in Brazil. The combination of the economic crisis that started
in 2014 and the recent radicalisation of Brazilian politics has only served to aggravate the project of
Brazilian democracy, with its worst signs of breakdown among the most vulnerable sectors of society.
However, for the black and poor populations of Brazilian communities, the urban struggles for life and
improvement of their life conditions have always been part of their narrative.

While networking and making my research findings widely public, I intend to expand the interdisciplinary
debate initiated in my thesis about how social scientists can effectively collaborate with the communities
they engage with during and after fieldwork, especially in the context of human rights violations and state
abuse.