Vivere un mondo di violenza. Battaglie, desiderio di futuro, sofferenze e conversione pentecostale in alcune favelas di Rio de Janeiro.

The aim of my PhD thesis is to explore the ways in which subjectivities articulate the continuum of violence (Scheper Hughes, Bourgois, 2004) in some favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Based on 15 month of fieldwork, the work aims to make visible how people live, understand, act and use violence in contexts of urban vulnerability and analyses, through ethnography, the concatenation (Auyero, Berti, 2015) between different forms and uses of violence in favelas. Life –and death – trajectories of my interlocutors and their affects challenge the normative understanding of violence as essentially public, masculinist and young (Auyero, Berti, 2015; Hume, 2009; Wilding, 2015) and suggest the need for an urgent problematisation of the rigid boundaries between domestic violence, abuse (Bourgois, 2011), drug-related violence, interpersonal, structural and symbolic violence. Articulating an hybrid grammar informed by the language of the armed conflict between police and narcotraffic and pentecostal language, subjectivities (Ortner, 2005) confuse and negotiate boundaries between victims and perpetrators, public and private sphere, street and home, tolerable and intolerable (Fassin, 2014), protection and exposure to violence.