Pearson Lunch and Learn with Javier Auyero

Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor high-crime neighborhood of Argentina and documentary evidence from court cases involving drug traffickers and police officers, this talk examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of the state security forces -- and their impact on skyrocketing urban violence. The presentation unpacks the much referred to (but seldom scrutinized) content of police-criminal collusion reconstructing the resources, relational practices, and processes at its core.

About Javier Auyero

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin where he directs the Urban Ethnography Lab. His main areas of research, writing and teaching are urban poverty, political ethnography, and collective violence.

He is the author of Poor People’s Politics (Duke University Press, 2000), Contentious Lives (Duke University Press, 2003), Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina(Cambridge University Press, 2007), Patients of the State(Duke University Press, 2012), and, together with Débora Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (Oxford University Press, 2009).

His latest book, In Harm’s Way: Interpersonal Violence at the Urban Margins, co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015.

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