Guest lecture by Fraya Frehse 'While making a home'

The Urban Institute were delighted to receive a presentation from Fraya Frehse, entitled 'While making a home: The situational impact of intersectional inequalities on urban public space'. Having recently finished a British Academy Visiting-Fellowship stay at the Centre of Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge, Fraya is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo. Fraya's work addresses urbanization from the standpoint of the daily social inequalities in urban public spaces in Latin America's largest cities, particularly São Paulo. A description of the presentation is included below.

 

 

Situational space matters in the lived experience of intersectional inequalities in Latin America. Like other metropolises, São Paulo has registered an extraordinary increase of women-headed family homelessness during the pandemic. This project addresses how social categories of difference contribute to the physical material and social setting of urban public spaces in post-Covid Latin America. It asks how homeless mothers have mobilized categories regarding class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age in streets and squares of the region’s largest metropolis to sustain their lives and children. It submits qualitative data on their socialreproductive interactions in São Paulo (2020-2023) to an analytical dialogue with state-of-the-art approaches to intersecting inequalities, street violence, everyday racism and urban marginality in Latin America. The hypothesis is that intersectional asymmetries play a ‘situational’ role in the production of urban public space. Their management within the spatial boundaries of face-to-face interaction moulds public space physical-materially and socially.