Laje

Complete Issue — Mobilities of/from the South Dossier

Revista Laje — 2025-11-18

Editorial — Mobilities of/from the South

Camila dos Santos Moraes — 2025-11-18

Infrastructures and urban space: the importance of the historical perspective of the movement

Dhan Zunino-Singh — 2025-11-18

From everyday life to public policy: mobilities, gender, and the city

Paola Jirón — 2025-11-18

On becoming ‘la sombra/the shadow’

Paola Jirón — 2025-11-18

This article proposes a hybrid and interdisciplinary methodology to understand the experience of mobility in the city of Santiago de Chile, from a phenomenological point of view. This methodology is the “shadowing” of mobility practices, which consists of accompanying the travelers in their everyday journeys and occupations for a period of time. Thus, an attempt to capture the ways in which mobility in cities is experienced by its inhabitants is carried out. In the first section, a description of the different ways in which mobile methods have evolved is presented; secondly, the ethnographic approach adopted in this research is explained, and finally, the article concludes with the description and analysis of a case of study.

The suburb that Rio de Janeiro invented

Frank Andrew Davies — 2025-11-18

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, suburb as a category carries a particular meaning, accumulating aesthetic, moral and affective connotations. The objective of this text is to analyze the imaginative mobilities that involve the suburbs of Rio. Inspired by the analytical framework of the mobile turn of social theory, we take as our empirical corpus audiovisual works that have created and continue to circulate polysemic meanings around the category. A falecida (1965), A Grande Família (1972-1975 and 2001-2014) and Suburbia (2012) reflect possibilities that orbit the imaginative repertoire about the suburbs and their inhabitants, amplifying their allegorical dimension and revealing the nuances explored in their meanings. Far from reflecting a systematic analysis of this production, we seek to underline the relevance of the theme and raise questions for a research agenda sensitive to the imaginative mobilities that define the menu of representations about Brazilian, Latin American and Global South cities.

Performance and collective mobilization

Talita Vasconcelos Brandão — 2025-11-18

This article reflects on Nina Caetano’s performance “Chorar os Filhos” (Crying the Children), presented at the Belo Horizonte International Theater Festival in 2018, and her subsequent video-lecture-performance, “Queremos que o Estado pare de matar menino” (We Want the State to Stop Killing Boys), from 2022. Using concepts from Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière, and testimonies from Rafaela Lima’s website “Quando o luto é luta” (When mourning is struggle) (2023), the text has as its backdrop the tensions of a mobility experienced as a frustrated promise or an impossibility. To the extent that mobility is always related to immobilities (SHELLER; URRY, 2008), which sustain or challenge it, the interruption of the urban flow through the performance can be read as a form of strategic immobility, which forces subjects to stop, reflect, and confront state violence. By addressing how performance constitutes a space of resistance and renewal in the collective of mothers, we seek to reflect on new ways of inhabiting and marking spaces of resistance.

“Weaponization” of the Narrative about Migrants of Global South

Suzana Duarte Santos Mallard — 2025-11-18

In recent decades, forced migrations have gained international relevance, often being manipulated as a political tool by governments of various regimes. The "weaponization" of migrants refers to the instrumentalization of migratory flows to achieve coercive, political, or economic goals, rather than treating these individuals as vulnerable subjects. This article explores how this "weaponization" occurs in narratives about displacements, creating a context of crisis and fear that stigmatizes migrants and presents them as threats to social stability. In the context of the Global South, this narrative manipulation deepens political and social tensions, negatively impacting both migrants and host societies. This study extends the concept of "weaponization" to include practices and discourses that reinforce stereotypes and biases, diverting attention from the structural causes of migration and hindering the development of more inclusive migration policies.

From counter-cultural journeys to collaborative journeys

Thaís Costa da Silva — 2025-11-18

In this paper, we draw parallels between the formation and articulation of Brazilian women's networks that promote community travel and the countercultural style of travel that flourished in the 1950s and 60s. We investigated the forms of political activism around the tourist mobilities constructed in these networks. We chose to conduct an ethnography, with in-depth interviews, participant observation and analysis of digital platforms. The empirical data are analysed in the light of theories on collaborative and cultural movements and intersectional feminism. The results show that women's collaborative travel today is close to countercultural ideals of freedom, but with deeper contours in terms of the intersectionality of feminism and the intense use of digital technologies.

My Beetle was stolen. And now?

Isabela Vianna Pinho — 2025-11-18

The article aims to understand how normative and mobility regimes operate within, and beyond, the outskirts of São Paulo. I argue that plural normative orders do not only permeate everyday life in the margins but overflow them and also affect the daily lives of different sectors of Brazilian society in differential ways. With an autoethnographic bias, the text starts from the experience of my Fusca being stolen in the city of Santos, Sao Paulo; from my dual position as a “victim” and a researcher of this topic, and from the responses given by the different actors that make up a multiple social mosaic, whether linked to the “world of crime,” state, media, or personal networks. The article seeks to engage not only with the fields of urban and crime studies but also incorporating contributions from the “mobility turn.” Thus, the notions of normative regimes and mobility help us understand how people manage (or do not manage) to move between normative instances, activating their social and network capitals. Finally, the article also provides contributions to the landscape of vehicle thefts and robberies in Brazil, which is underexplored in the literature, despite being connected to a broader legal and illegal market.

Justice and micromobility

Adriana de Souza e Silva — 2025-11-18

Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil) are among the largest megacities In Latin America. Latin American cities have been actively integrating micromobility services as part of people’s urban mobility habits. However, this integration lacked other sustainable mobility changes, such as access to bike paths, proper smartphones, and mobile internet. Much of the scholarship on shared transportation in the Global South does not analyze how they are integrated with sustainable and “just” ways of moving through the city. Often emerging technologies are appropriated into existing patterns of mobility injustice, perpetuating existing inequalities. This paper analyzes the development of electric scooters in Rio de Janeiro as a case of how micromobility is embedded into existing and systemic issues of mobility injustice. Drawing from news articles, we describe the diverse uses of scooters in Rio de Janeiro, and their integration with smartphones. Our findings help to contextualize micromobility in developing world mega-cities.

Desafios da mobilidade urbana em contexto de mudanças climáticas

Filipe Ungaro Marino — 2025-11-18

Brazil has demonstrated, through recent environmental tragedies, the vulnerability of its urban mobility infrastructure. Framing the climate change contexto and the exacerbation of environmental crises in Brazil, this paper examines, through a review of reports, five environmental tragedies that occurred in the past 15 years, focusing on their impacts on the mobility infrastructure of the affected areas. The outcomes of these events highlight the fragility of existing infrastructures, resulting in social and material losses that permeate throughout Brazilian society. Based on an in-depth exploration of the resilience concept and its update, with a focus on urban mobility studies, the role of capability and adaptability in fostering infrastructure better suited to climate change is investigated. The paper underscores the imperative of incorporating resilience into urban mobility systems as a central means for the survival and continuity of urban life in future Brazilian cities.

Watch out for the pothole!

Gladys Nyachieo — 2025-11-18

This study examines the complex interplay of political influences, road maintenance, and safety in Kenya. Using a desk research methodology. It aims to understand pothole detection, infrastructure development, and community involvement in road repairs. A comprehensive data collection approach using keywords like “pothole detection” and “political influence on road rehabilitation” was employed. Findings reveal that political agendas and ethnic favoritism significantly affect road repair prioritization, often neglecting less connected areas. Community involvement, though crucial, is underutilized, and technological advancements offer promising solutions. Corruption and inconsistent policies further hinder effective maintenance. The study concludes that improving infrastructure management can enhance economic productivity, public safety, and quality of life, but requires comprehensive strategies.

Brief overview of scientific production on Brazil-Chile migration flows

Sidney Dupeyrat de Santana — 2025-11-18

Regional migration has been gaining increasing attention in the Brazilian scientific community. The historical tendency to prioritize analyses of European, Asian and Arab immigration or Brazilian emigration, mainly to the United States and Western Europe, is being modified by a greater number of studies addressing South-South migration, reflecting the growth of these migratory flows in the world, in the region and in Brazil. In this context, the immigration of South Americans to Brazil and of Brazilians to neighboring countries are analyzed from different perspectives. In this work, we intend to examine the scientific production in Brazil on migratory flows between Brazil and Chile, seeking to identify the most widely used themes, concepts and forms of analysis.

Morenos and markets, cholitas and sambódromos

Vinícius de Souza Mendes — 2025-11-18

In about ten years, Bolivian folkloric festivals in São Paulo, Brazil, have significantly changed their level – objectively and symbolically. Previously held in small spaces and led by a small group of fraternities (fraternidades), they now burst onto avenues, squares and large public and private structures in the city, such as the Anhembi, demanding more economic resources and, in parallel, actors capable of mobilizing and organizing the movement of other people, goods, narratives, images and instruments of political action. In this essay, which accompanies a set of photographs of these festivities taken between 2019 and 2024, I argue that this expansion of the Bolivian festival in the metropolis reflects the socio-economic rise of many Bolivians within São Paulo's productive dynamics. The festive contexts then function as reinvestments of the same kind made by those who have ascended. This is because, in Andean Bolivia, the party is a social event of its own, in which the meaning is more to ritualize the social than to “celebrate”.

Violence, everyday life, and sociabilities

Alexandre Magalhães — 2025-11-18