title: Livelihoods, capabilities and insurgent citizenship in and around a
      rainforest metropolis
title: from violent urbanism to a new rurality?
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Piva Da Silva, Mariana
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017
Subjects: capabilities, violence, insurgent citizenship, inequality, migration, Amazon

description: Latin America is one of the most unequal and violent regions in the world.
      This unevenly affects the poor, who bear a disproportionate share of
      social pathologies including violence, poor health and inadequate access
      to healthcare and social rights. This uneven distribution of injustices
      has been theorized as “differentiated citizenship.” These injustices
      impinge on the wellbeing of the poor in several ways. The capabilities
      approach has contributed to expand notions of wellbeing recognising that
      social injustices are a serious threat to it. This approach offers a
      conceptualization of wellbeing that places central emphasis on dignity and
      freedom, seeing wellbeing in terms of what individuals are able to do and
      to be within society. Migration has been seen as one of the responses to
      unfair socio-economic conditions and distribution of rights. Because of
      its importance in shaping biodiversity, human migration in the Amazon is a
      well-studied subject. The majority of migration research in the region has
      adopted a quantitative approach and focused on the socio-economic and
      political drivers of migration – specifically, rural-urban and urban-urban
      migration and its implications for the region's development and
      environment. Thus, many of these studies tend to frame poverty within
      material and rights-deprivation frameworks without addressing how people
      experience poverty, the degree to which they are capable of improving
      their conditions and how these things relate to people’s understanding of
      their own freedom and wellbeing. 
      
      This thesis attempts to understand an under-studied urban-to-rural (from a
      metropolis to a new forest-frontier) flow of working class citizens in the
      Amazon. In order to do this, this thesis explores the daily lives of the
      working classes in the Amazonian countryside and city, as well as their
      experiences of symbolic and material injustices, including the production,
      reproduction and performances of inequalities. Adopting a qualitative
      approach and drawing on the capabilities and insurgent citizenship
      theoretical frameworks, this study compares urban and rural contexts,
      analysing the experiences of people who are relatively marginalized within
      Brazil’s highly stratified society. This thesis is the result of a journey
      that began on a new agricultural-deforestation frontier, one hundred
      kilometres from Manaus, Brazil. Initially focused on investigating the
      potential socio-environmental benefits of fish-farming for that region,
      this research took a different direction when I came across to novel
      social transitions and landscape transformations manifest in the process
      of former city-dwellers (re)emerging as rural peasants. 
      
      This thesis proceeds through three data chapters. Embedded in the global
      debate surrounding the long-standing search for environmental and social
      sustainability in Amazonia, chapter two provides insights into the
      potential of fish farming to support conservation and regional food
      security in the Brazilian Amazon. 
      
      Chapters three and four are based on participant observation: the life
      histories and experiences of working class former city-dwellers living in
      the rural areas surrounding Manaus (chapter three) and on current
      residents of this metropolis (chapter four). Through the lens of
      capabilities and citizenship approaches, chapter three explores the
      experiences of urban social injustices and oppression and how it contrasts
      (and in some ways, contributes to or motivates) their new rural lives.
      Drawing on the capabilities , strucural violence and disadvantages
      apporoaches, chapter four attempts to critically analyse working class
      individuals’experiences of urban deprivation and violence in Manaus.
      
      Chapter 3 reveals that the socio-environmental context of the countryside
      that surrounds Manaus is apparently much safer and less socially
      stratified than that of the metropolis, which seems to foster improvements
      in central capabilities. An apparently lower risk of violence considerably
      reduces fear and anxiety around bodily integrity and of others leading the
      new colonists to experience an increased sense of safeness and freedom,
      which appeared to contribute to an enhanced capacity for agency in
      comparison to that offered by the city. Alongside this, less evident
      social inequalities in the rural areas seems to positively influence the
      new rural citizens’ sense of dignity and self-worth. In addition, the
      establishment of a new life has required migrants to collectively mobilize
      in pursuit of their rights, seeking fuller forms of citizenship. I
      interpret this urban to rural movement as a form of insurgent citizenship
      in response to an oppressive urban reality, which I examine in Chapter
      four.
      
      Chapter four argues that structural violence (re)produces various
      disadvantages that contribute to capabilities failures among the Amazonian
      urban working class. High levels of violence impinge upon free movement,
      threaten bodily integrity, cause negative emotions, and damage social
      affiliation, resulting in severe constraint to individual flourishing.
      Despite experiencing some economic prosperity throughout their lives, many
      were unable to change and improve their capacities to do and to be and to
      live a dignified life due to a cluster of ‘corrosive’ disadvantages
      centred on bodily and structural violence.
      
      These findings offer new insights to the debate surrounding human
      migration and insurgent citizenship in the Amazon which has hitherto paid
      little attention to the link between poverty and the deprivation of
      capabilities. The thesis' own change in direction – from addressing
      grand global challenges about Amazon’s sustainability towards the equally
      important locally-experienced social injustice – also offers insights into
      the possible limitations of research and policy-making which, dominated by
      remotely-defined global challenges, fails to capture the social
      transitions that define the lives and wellbeing of ordinary citizens.