Comparison across space(s) and time(s) has been a key epistemological device influencing all the research findings from this project.
Comparison across time and space is a central practice in everyday life, not reserved to the anthropological exercise (Heil 2019). Paying attention to this capacity and skill and addressing transnationally mobile, recently arrived urban dwellers as true masters of comparison significantly deepens the scientific understanding of conviviality, migration projects, or the challenges of living in diversifying, but deeply unequal cities.
In the case of Senegalese newcomers to Rio de Janeiro, I show the multiple scales—from global to local—on which newcomers operate to make sense of a precarious everyday encounter, for example, between Muslim newcomers and resident queer populations (Heil 2019). Regarding this encounter, my interlocutors make use of, and transcend, the global debates on homonationalism and queer necropolitics, as they recontextualise these debates. The analytical attention to their ability of comparison has provided the basis for questioning the homogenizing accounts of urban or migrant marginality. It shows how the interplay of multiple geographical and local locations result in situational positionalities that are characteristic of contemporary urban configurations.
Working with Spanish newcomers whose socio-economic and educational profiles were very close to my own made the parallels between their and my own comparisons more explicit. Beyond methodological reflection, my own trajectory in Rio de Janeiro as a recently arrived German became the third—auto-ethnographic—case relevant in the analysis. Regarding the reconfiguration of power asymmetries mainly defined by coloniality, postcoloniality and whiteness (Heil 2020), Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro continuously produced meaning on their migration and local social status at the intersections of local, racialised relations, historical relations of coloniality between Europe and Latin America, and inner-European, North-South power asymmetries (as expressed in post-2008 austerity politics, for example).
In the case of Senegalese newcomers to Rio de Janeiro, I show the multiple scales—from global to local—on which newcomers operate to make sense of a precarious everyday encounter, for example, between Muslim newcomers and resident queer populations (Heil 2019). Regarding this encounter, my interlocutors make use of, and transcend, the global debates on homonationalism and queer necropolitics, as they recontextualise these debates. The analytical attention to their ability of comparison has provided the basis for questioning the homogenizing accounts of urban or migrant marginality. It shows how the interplay of multiple geographical and local locations result in situational positionalities that are characteristic of contemporary urban configurations.
Working with Spanish newcomers whose socio-economic and educational profiles were very close to my own made the parallels between their and my own comparisons more explicit. Beyond methodological reflection, my own trajectory in Rio de Janeiro as a recently arrived German became the third—auto-ethnographic—case relevant in the analysis. Regarding the reconfiguration of power asymmetries mainly defined by coloniality, postcoloniality and whiteness (Heil 2020), Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro continuously produced meaning on their migration and local social status at the intersections of local, racialised relations, historical relations of coloniality between Europe and Latin America, and inner-European, North-South power asymmetries (as expressed in post-2008 austerity politics, for example).