Generation, Democratization and Gang Violence in the Shanties: Haiti and South Africa

In this project, I seek an opportunity at STIAS to write several chapters of a book based on a comparative account of the nexus between violence and democracy in two shantytowns in Haiti and South Africa.
The project builds on a series of transdisciplinary studies of violence that combine multistage quantitative and ethnographic data over a stretch of 20 years. Through this residency at STIAS, I will use these findings to generate a conversation between Haitian/Caribbean, American and South African scholars that interrogates the standard categorization and analysis of and community responses to violence as imposed by classical social and intervention sciences. The publication that will emerge from this project will comprise a fundamental contribution to  our understanding of social dynamics in the studied shanties, as well as those of other locations around the world, equally marginal to and marginalized by the economic and political processes of contemporary capitalism.