CFP LASA 2015 "Slums on Show: Poverty and Violence as Spectacular Commodity". XXXIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association May 27-30, 2015, San Juan, Puerto Rico

We invite papers for a panel to be held at the LASA 2015 Congress, May 27-30 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This panel will explore the commodification and aestheticization of poverty and violence in Latin American cities, focusing specifically on so-called "slum tourism". Such processes transform urban deprivation into a consumer product, in the context of shifts towards cultural economies of spectacle. Hostels in squatter settlements offer tourists accommodation in "folk" environs. Gentrification and militarization, often in tandem, signal an intensifying politics of land speculation in slums, favelas, barrios, comunas, and ghettos across Latin America. These processes raise numerous questions concerning power, inequality and subjectivity, and specifically how the spatialization of class, gender, sexual, and race relations is being reshaped. We are interested in papers that bring an ethnographic perspective to the slum as space of encounter and transaction between residents, professionalized brokers and informal intermediaries, and an international class of cultural producers and consumers. We are interested in papers that focus on the political economy of informal settlements, as well as their representational/performative politics. Please send abstracts (max. 250w) by August 6, 2014, to Eveline Dürr (Eveline.Duerr@vka.fak12.uni-muenchen.de).