Aspirational Activism im urbanen Lateinamerika
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The aspirational dimension of new forms of activism is directly related to changing expectations of material and moral improvements in the quality of life among urban populations. The project was an anthropological investigation of what has become a well-known style of mobilization throughout the region to improve the quality of life in cities. I used an ethnographic approach, with data-gathering techniques such as informal and in-depth interviews, participant observation, detached observations, photographic registry of activities, documentary research, and social media analyses. The object of study was an unprecedented wave of mobilizations in Latin America that is no longer initially guided by ideological premises, like previous movements were, but by concrete aspirations. This means that instead of using ideas of what the social world should look like, activists relied more on technical studies about better ways of using public resources and spaces, especially regarding mobility (policies about public transport, pedestrians, or other ways people move in cities). Using the original concept of ‘aspirational activism’, I explored the significance of this type of mobilization as a development through which individuals make use of recent advances in education and other forms of cultural capital available to them. The way they choose to use knowledge and cultural references does not follow traditional forms of political alignments (i.e. through political parties, unions, or other forms of corporatist or clientelist structure). This has frequently been misinterpreted as an anti-political, as a way of avoiding an engagement with common issues through negotiations. From my observations and interviews, however, I concur with some authors who argue that it is rather a change of how the political is enacted. Through more open uses of technical knowledge, away from closed deliberations between established institutional actors and more present in the public sphere with strong uses of social media, activists have shaken the public sphere. Although the stated pursuit of improved forms of democratic decision-making at the urban level by activists challenged established corporatist and clientelist networks, I found that they reproduced inequalities in new ways. As my research progressed, I noticed that the increasing reliance on technical knowledge and other forms of cultural capital not only favoured a small minority of already-privileged individuals in activist circles, but actually perpetuated existing socioeconomic inequalities. Activists tended to focuse more on improving their own standing to become more influential, than on designing innovative democratic mechanisms of urban governance.
