Jean François Mayer and Tina Hilgers receive a SSHRC Insight Grant
Congratulations to Jean François Mayer and Tina Hilgers for receiving a SSRHC Insight Grant ! Their project is entitled: " Informality, Violence, and Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean".
Insight Grants support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities.
Jean François Mayer and Tina Hilgers are both professors in the political science department at Concordia University, as well as founding members of ÉRIGAL. Their project "Informality, violence and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean" addresses the issue of scarce research on marginalized citizens’ preferred responses to chronic violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities, and does so by co-producing knowledge with the researched populations. The long-term, ingrained use of force and power causing physical and psychological damage among the millions of citizens living in urban informal settlements and working in informal jobs is an important development concern. People who find themselves having to build their own shelters and invent activities to generate income with no regulatory support from the state are often the most vulnerable to violence, whether from the police, organized crime, or social and economic contacts or elites. But state and societal indifference to these people, their own mistrust of the state, and the potential danger to researchers seeking information on violence, means that they and their daily strategies of resistance largely remain invisible. This project seeks to fill this gap with data from the cities of Medellin (Colombia), São Paulo (Brazil), and Kingston (Jamaica).
We wish them great success in their research.
