Violence and Urban Poverty in Latin America: Ethnographic and Qualitative Perspectives

Living in a barrio, favela, villa, or colonia means living in a state of emergency, caught in the middle of armed confrontations between state and non-state actors. This course has three main objectives: 1) to understand urban violence from the perspective of people living in poor and marginalized areas; 2) to analyze how ethnographic and interpretive research on urban violence in Latin America is presented; and 3) to consider the ethnographic narrative, the voice of the ethnographer and the challenges of conducting research in violent settings where the research itself is a social problem.