Simone is a Newton International Fellow from São Paulo, Brazil, currently visiting at the Urban Institute.

This hybrid event will be chaired by Philipp Horn, The University of Sheffield with commentators Olivia Casagrande and Abdoumaliq Simone The University of Sheffield, Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews and Fraya Frehse, University of São Paulo.

About the book… Acknowledging ‘messiness’ as integral to the life processes of international migrants living in the city of São Paulo, the book is an invitation to appreciate the contradictions and ambiguities involved in the making of contingent urban lives. It is also a critique of generalisation and essentialisation as violent epistemic operations in migration and urban studies. By paying attention to the messiness embedding the journeys of some international migrants, life can be conceived and lived in singular ways. To do justice to the singularity of these lives, the book, as an ethnographic endeavour, finds in Lévinas’s idea of the ‘irreducibility of the Other’ a theoretical way to evoke migrants’ lives in their potentialities and uncertainties, without de-facing them in operations of generalisation, coherence, and consistency. It also uses imagination and fiction to establish an empathic disposition towards the experiences of these international migrants, proposed as ‘resonance.’ In this way, five singular life stories of migrants from Paraguay, South Korea, China, and Bolivia are rendered as journeys across the city of São Paulo and the world. Here is a proposal of an anthropological approach that is more an ethics – a considerate attendance to the presence of others in the world - than a form of knowledge; an anthropological approach in which truth is not the outcome of a series of scientific procedures, but a form of appreciation of the human.

There will be drinks reception 1630-1800 for those attending in person.

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