James Holston
Biographic Data
| ID | 127774 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Holston |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Holston |
| SIGNATURE | HOLSTON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6712-3767 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1061 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Solo Mothers and New Formations of Collective Life in São Paulo’s Peripheries
In 2010 in the city of São Paulo, 37 percent of mothers were solo mothers, compared to 16 percent in 1960. This meant that more than 1 million women in 2010 were raising their children without a partner. The increase in solo motherhood is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of deep transformations that have reshuffled entrenched formations of gender hierarchies, family arrangements, class inequalities, and racial discrimination in São Paulo. In …
Democracia Direta Insurgente
Nesta exposição, proponho que o que torna a democracia democrática é seu caráter direto e insurgente. Portanto, defendo a democracia direta como solução para uma democracia verdadeiramente democrática. Exponho características da democracia direta que mostram sua viabilidade nos dias de hoje, e argumento que ela só é rejeitada por ser escandalosamente inconveniente: a cidadania democrática desvia a atenção das seduções da vida privada; corrói os p…
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
What makes democratic citizenship democratic
I contend that parliamentary representative democracy betrays what must be democratic about democratic citizenship – its directness. I examine this betrayal to consider what makes democratic citizenship democratic, what is direct about direct democracy, and how it may provide a means to (re)democratize democracy. To do so, I engage the conundrums about citizenship Aristotle posed in the Politics. For millennia, theorists have used Aristotle’s dis…
Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil
Synergies Between Technology, Participation, and Citizen Science in a Community-Based Dengue Prevention Program
As mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika continue to develop, traditional approaches have not curbed the epidemics, and evidence suggests that community-based programs are an effective alternative. In Paraguay, more than 8,300 cases of dengue were reported in 2019. Recent entomological surveys found that the percentage of houses with Aedes aegypti larvae is as high as 20% in the capital. In this context and based on the experiences of Cami…
Metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the city
This article analyzes the remarkable wave of metropolitan rebellions that inaugurated the 21st century around the world (2000-2016). It argues that they fuel an emergent politics of city-making in which residents consider the city as a collective social and material product that they produce; in effect, a commons. It investigates this politics at the intersection of processes of city-making, city-occupying, and rights-claiming that generate movem…
Rebeliões metropolitanas e planejamento insurgente no século XXI
A insurgência inaugurou o século XXI com uma série de rebeliões metropolitanas. Buenos Aires, Atenas, Reykjavik, Tunes, Cairo, New York, Madri, Phnom Penh, Istambul, São Paulo e inúmeras outras cidades ao redor do mundo rebelaram-se de formas diferentes, rejeitando as políticas existentes e assaltando o Estado com alternativas. Muitas dessas alternativas surgiram da própria produção da vida cotidiana urbana dos manifestantes e foram prefiguradas …
Filtering Dissent
Hailed as organizational tools of the oppressed, social media have also emerged as powerful surveillance apparatuses, but could existing power structures be reinforced even by the very algorithms they use to order data? A history of algorithmic filtering and a case study of its role in the land struggles of Brazil’s Guarani and Kaiowá peoples
Participatory urban planning in Brazil
This paper focuses on participatory urban planning as a model of urban reform and democratic invention in Brazil. Its case material regards the formulation and implementation of two sets of urban laws of very broad consequence. First, we discuss briefly the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Citizen Constitution and the federal law that it mandates. The latter is the Estatuto da Cidade, the City Statute, from 2001, which required that 1600 citie…
Come to the Street: Urban Protest, Brazil 2013
W hen street demonstrations overtook Brazilian cities in June, critics from Left to Right were quick to assert what they were not: they were not organized by recognizable, tried-and-true forms of social protest (social movements, political parties, labor unions, churches, professional associations, human rights groups, NGOs); they were leaderless; they lacked political articulation; they had no consolidated agenda; they refused the Press; they di…
Contesting privilege with right: The transformation of differentiated citizenship in Brazil
This paper suggests that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them. To make this case, it examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal member…
Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship: Gang Talk, Rights Talk and Rule of Law in Brazil
This article considers an apparently perplexing aspect of democratization in Brazil: the use by notorious criminal gangs ( comandos) from the poor urban peripheries and prisons of the discourses of democratic citizenship, justice, and rule of law to represent their own organizations and intentions. I situate this use within an unsettling development in Latin America generally during the last 30 years: the coincidence of increasing political democ…
Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries
The extraordinary urbanization of the 20th century has produced urban peripheries of devastating poverty and inequality in cities worldwide. At the same time, the struggles of their residents for the basic resources of daily life and shelter have also generated new movements of insurgent citizenship based on their claims to have a right to the city and a right to rights. The resulting contemporary metropolis is a site of collision between forces …
La ciudad modernista y la muerte de la calle
The purpose of this article is to examine the street (and what has replaced it), in two contrasting urban types: Pre- industrial Rio de Janeiro and Ouro Preto and modernist Brasilia. Questions will be asked regarding the design and planning of the streets and what they can reveal about urban organization in these cities. Inquires will be made about the knowledge that this type of organization can offer concerning the nature of political regimes a…
State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions
This chapter contains section titled: Total Planning Modernization without Substantive Citizenship The Context of Change Democratic Planning and the Neoliberal State Some Paradoxical Uses of the Statute Notes
Spatial Design and American Democracy
Cities and Citizenship
Cities and citizenship
Alternative Modernities: Statecraft and Religious Imagination in the Valley of the Dawn
Many new religions promote the emblems and institutions of modern nation-states. In this article, I consider an example from Brazil, analyzing the mimetic relations between its modernist capital, Brasilia, and a millenarian and ecstatic religion called the Valley of the Dawn located on the city's outskirts. I focus on the project of salvation that each sponsors and on a religious ritual that stages a judicial event associated with the state. Argu…
Democracy and Violence in Brazil
Democracy has expanded remarkably throughout the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1972, there were fifty-two electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world's 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number had risen to 118 electoral democracies out of 191 states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries with a population of one million people or more, th…
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities are full of stories in time, some sedimented and catalogued; others spoorlike, vestigial, and dispersed. Their narratives are epic and everyday; they tell of migration and production, law and laughter, revolution and art. Yet, although obvious, their registry is never wholly legible because eachCities are plugged into the globe of history like capacitors: they condense and conduct the currents of social time. Their layered surfaces, their …
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities and Citizenship
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities and Citizenship
Research Article| May 01 1996 Cities and Citizenship James Holston; James Holston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arjun Appadurai Arjun Appadurai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (2): 187-204. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-2-187 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Holston, Arjun Appadurai; Cities an…
Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries
The extraordinary urbanization of the 20th century has produced urban peripheries of devastating poverty and inequality in cities worldwide. At the same time, the struggles of their residents for the basic resources of daily life and shelter have also generated new movements of insurgent citizenship based on their claims to have a right to the city and a right to rights. The resulting contemporary metropolis is a site of collision between forces …
Democracy and Violence in Brazil
Democracy has expanded remarkably throughout the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1972, there were fifty-two electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world's 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number had risen to 118 electoral democracies out of 191 states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries with a population of one million people or more, th…
Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil
The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil
How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctio…
Cities and Citizenship
Contesting privilege with right: The transformation of differentiated citizenship in Brazil
This paper suggests that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them. To make this case, it examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal member…
Metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the city
This article analyzes the remarkable wave of metropolitan rebellions that inaugurated the 21st century around the world (2000-2016). It argues that they fuel an emergent politics of city-making in which residents consider the city as a collective social and material product that they produce; in effect, a commons. It investigates this politics at the intersection of processes of city-making, city-occupying, and rights-claiming that generate movem…
The modernist city: An anthropological critique of Brasília
Alternative Modernities: Statecraft and Religious Imagination in the Valley of the Dawn
Many new religions promote the emblems and institutions of modern nation-states. In this article, I consider an example from Brazil, analyzing the mimetic relations between its modernist capital, Brasilia, and a millenarian and ecstatic religion called the Valley of the Dawn located on the city's outskirts. I focus on the project of salvation that each sponsors and on a religious ritual that stages a judicial event associated with the state. Argu…
Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship: Gang Talk, Rights Talk and Rule of Law in Brazil
This article considers an apparently perplexing aspect of democratization in Brazil: the use by notorious criminal gangs ( comandos) from the poor urban peripheries and prisons of the discourses of democratic citizenship, justice, and rule of law to represent their own organizations and intentions. I situate this use within an unsettling development in Latin America generally during the last 30 years: the coincidence of increasing political democ…
Participatory urban planning in Brazil
This paper focuses on participatory urban planning as a model of urban reform and democratic invention in Brazil. Its case material regards the formulation and implementation of two sets of urban laws of very broad consequence. First, we discuss briefly the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Citizen Constitution and the federal law that it mandates. The latter is the Estatuto da Cidade, the City Statute, from 2001, which required that 1600 citie…
Come to the Street: Urban Protest, Brazil 2013
W hen street demonstrations overtook Brazilian cities in June, critics from Left to Right were quick to assert what they were not: they were not organized by recognizable, tried-and-true forms of social protest (social movements, political parties, labor unions, churches, professional associations, human rights groups, NGOs); they were leaderless; they lacked political articulation; they had no consolidated agenda; they refused the Press; they di…
Synergies Between Technology, Participation, and Citizen Science in a Community-Based Dengue Prevention Program
As mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika continue to develop, traditional approaches have not curbed the epidemics, and evidence suggests that community-based programs are an effective alternative. In Paraguay, more than 8,300 cases of dengue were reported in 2019. Recent entomological surveys found that the percentage of houses with Aedes aegypti larvae is as high as 20% in the capital. In this context and based on the experiences of Cami…
La ciudad modernista y la muerte de la calle
The purpose of this article is to examine the street (and what has replaced it), in two contrasting urban types: Pre- industrial Rio de Janeiro and Ouro Preto and modernist Brasilia. Questions will be asked regarding the design and planning of the streets and what they can reveal about urban organization in these cities. Inquires will be made about the knowledge that this type of organization can offer concerning the nature of political regimes a…
The modernist city: An anthropological critique of Brasília
Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil
The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil
How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctio…
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia
Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies: The Local Transformation of Practice, Power Relations, and Consciousness. Allan Pred
Cities and Citizenship
Research Article| May 01 1996 Cities and Citizenship James Holston; James Holston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arjun Appadurai Arjun Appadurai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (2): 187-204. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-2-187 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Holston, Arjun Appadurai; Cities an…
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities are full of stories in time, some sedimented and catalogued; others spoorlike, vestigial, and dispersed. Their narratives are epic and everyday; they tell of migration and production, law and laughter, revolution and art. Yet, although obvious, their registry is never wholly legible because eachCities are plugged into the globe of history like capacitors: they condense and conduct the currents of social time. Their layered surfaces, their …
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities and Citizenship
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Cities and citizenship
Alternative Modernities: Statecraft and Religious Imagination in the Valley of the Dawn
Many new religions promote the emblems and institutions of modern nation-states. In this article, I consider an example from Brazil, analyzing the mimetic relations between its modernist capital, Brasilia, and a millenarian and ecstatic religion called the Valley of the Dawn located on the city's outskirts. I focus on the project of salvation that each sponsors and on a religious ritual that stages a judicial event associated with the state. Argu…
Democracy and Violence in Brazil
Democracy has expanded remarkably throughout the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1972, there were fifty-two electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world's 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number had risen to 118 electoral democracies out of 191 states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries with a population of one million people or more, th…
Cities and Citizenship
Spatial Design and American Democracy
State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions
This chapter contains section titled: Total Planning Modernization without Substantive Citizenship The Context of Change Democratic Planning and the Neoliberal State Some Paradoxical Uses of the Statute Notes
La ciudad modernista y la muerte de la calle
The purpose of this article is to examine the street (and what has replaced it), in two contrasting urban types: Pre- industrial Rio de Janeiro and Ouro Preto and modernist Brasilia. Questions will be asked regarding the design and planning of the streets and what they can reveal about urban organization in these cities. Inquires will be made about the knowledge that this type of organization can offer concerning the nature of political regimes a…
Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship: Gang Talk, Rights Talk and Rule of Law in Brazil
This article considers an apparently perplexing aspect of democratization in Brazil: the use by notorious criminal gangs ( comandos) from the poor urban peripheries and prisons of the discourses of democratic citizenship, justice, and rule of law to represent their own organizations and intentions. I situate this use within an unsettling development in Latin America generally during the last 30 years: the coincidence of increasing political democ…
Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries
The extraordinary urbanization of the 20th century has produced urban peripheries of devastating poverty and inequality in cities worldwide. At the same time, the struggles of their residents for the basic resources of daily life and shelter have also generated new movements of insurgent citizenship based on their claims to have a right to the city and a right to rights. The resulting contemporary metropolis is a site of collision between forces …
Contesting privilege with right: The transformation of differentiated citizenship in Brazil
This paper suggests that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them. To make this case, it examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal member…
Come to the Street: Urban Protest, Brazil 2013
W hen street demonstrations overtook Brazilian cities in June, critics from Left to Right were quick to assert what they were not: they were not organized by recognizable, tried-and-true forms of social protest (social movements, political parties, labor unions, churches, professional associations, human rights groups, NGOs); they were leaderless; they lacked political articulation; they had no consolidated agenda; they refused the Press; they di…
Participatory urban planning in Brazil
This paper focuses on participatory urban planning as a model of urban reform and democratic invention in Brazil. Its case material regards the formulation and implementation of two sets of urban laws of very broad consequence. First, we discuss briefly the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Citizen Constitution and the federal law that it mandates. The latter is the Estatuto da Cidade, the City Statute, from 2001, which required that 1600 citie…
Rebeliões metropolitanas e planejamento insurgente no século XXI
A insurgência inaugurou o século XXI com uma série de rebeliões metropolitanas. Buenos Aires, Atenas, Reykjavik, Tunes, Cairo, New York, Madri, Phnom Penh, Istambul, São Paulo e inúmeras outras cidades ao redor do mundo rebelaram-se de formas diferentes, rejeitando as políticas existentes e assaltando o Estado com alternativas. Muitas dessas alternativas surgiram da própria produção da vida cotidiana urbana dos manifestantes e foram prefiguradas …
Filtering Dissent
Hailed as organizational tools of the oppressed, social media have also emerged as powerful surveillance apparatuses, but could existing power structures be reinforced even by the very algorithms they use to order data? A history of algorithmic filtering and a case study of its role in the land struggles of Brazil’s Guarani and Kaiowá peoples
Political science (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Citizenship (15 works) · Law (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Democracy (6 works) · Political economy (6 works)