Teresa Caldeira

Professor of Anthropology (PhD: U of California, Berkeley, 1992)
5275 Social Sciences Plaza A
(949) 824-1072
email: tpcaldei at uci dot edu

Professor Professor Caldeira' s research has addressed questions of (a) social discrimination, spatial segregation, and urban change; (b) urban violence; (c) citizenship, democracy, and individual rights; (d) social movements and popular political participation; (e) gender relations; and (f) youth cultures in the context of neoliberalism. She has researched these questions through extended fieldwork projects in São Paulo, Brazil.

Professor Caldeira has always worked in an interdisciplinary manner, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences. Her first two projects focused especially on the political participation of working class residents of the periphery of São Paulo and their efforts to settle in the city and urbanize their neighborhoods. These workers became one of the main political actors in Brazil's transition to democracy as they organized social movements to demand their "rights to the city." These projects demonstrated how urbanization, social movements, and democratic consolidation were intrinsically intertwined. Professor Caldeira's two next research projects dealt with the reverse side of the expansion of citizenship. They investigated the processes that have simultaneously challenged democratization and created a new form of spatial segregation. They analyzed the increase in violent crime, the contestation of human rights, and the proliferation of fortified enclaves as processes that have helped to undermine the expansion of rights to the city and political rights achieved in the first moment of democratic consolidation. The main publication resulting from these projects is the book City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. (University of California Press, 2000). Focusing on São Paulo and using comparative data on Los Angeles, the book suggests that the new pattern of urban segregation developing in these cities is also appearing in many metropolises around the world. In São Paulo, this pattern combines with police violence, privatization of justice, and disrespect for human rights, challenging the democratic consolidation. The book won the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize in 2001. Information about the book, including a photograph of the jacket, can be found at: City of Walls.

Professor Caldeira's current research focuses on young men and women from all social classes living in São Paulo and investigates the paradoxical and unprecedented ways in which they are recreating gender roles. This recreation is paradoxical because it simultaneously breaks with past models and reproduces in almost caricature fashion some traditional attributes of these roles, especially male aggressiveness and female sensuality. The most emblematic expressions of these trends are, on the one hand, male involvement with guns, crime, and artistic-stylistic expressions valorizing risk and aggressiveness, such as hip-hop. On the other hand, these trends are present in young girls' preference for styles and careers that valorize the exposure of a sexualized body. The recreation of gender roles is unprecedented because it articulates in explicit ways two issues that traditionally have been either silenced or disguised in Brazilian society: racism and class antagonism.

Professor Caldeira has received a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship in 2001. During 2002, she was a visiting scholar at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Violence (NEV) and the Department of Anthropology.

Selected Publications

Forthcoming with James Holston. State and Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.
Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, editors. London: Blackwell.

2002 Police Violence in Democratic Brazil.
Ethnography 3(3): 235-263.

2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

2000 The Making and Unmaking of Democratic Spaces. In The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about "Things in the Making."
Joan Ockman editor. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 224-233.

1999 with James Holston, Democracy and Violence in Brazil.
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(4):691-729.

1998 Justice and Individual Rights: Challenges for Women's Movements and Democratization in Brazil.
In Women and Democracy - Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Jane S. Jaquette and Sharon L. Wolchik, editors. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 75-103.

1996 Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation.
Public Culture 8(2): 303-328.

1984 A Politica dos Outros (O Cotidiano dos Moradores da Periferia e o que Pensam do Poder e dos Poderosos). São Paulo: Brasiliense.