Tori Holmes

Reframing the Favela, Remapping the City: Territorial Embeddedness and (Trans) Locality in ‘Framing Content’ on Brazilian Favela Blogs

In recent years, the internet has become a key site for the portrayal of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. This article examines blogging by favela residents and argues that digital culture constitutes a vital, and as yet not systematically explored, arena of research on the representation of Rio de Janeiro and its favelas. Based on ethnographically inspired research carried out in 2009–2010, this article examines two examples of blog ‘framing content’ (a sidebar and a static page) encountered during fieldwork, which functioned to establish a concrete link between the posts on the blogs in question, their authors, and a named favela, even when the posts were not explicitly about that favela. At the same time, the framing content also made visible, and affirmed, the translocal connections between that favela, other favelas, and the city as a whole. These illustrative examples from a wider study show how favela bloggers are engaged in resignifying and remapping the relationships between different empirical scales of locality (and associated identities) in Rio de Janeiro, demonstrating the contribution an interdisciplinary approach to the digital texts and practices of favela residents can make to an understanding of the contemporary city and its representational conundrums, from the perspective of ‘ordinary practitioners’.

Ethical Dilemmas in Studying Blogging by Favela Residents in Brazil

This chapter reflects on the place and contribution of empirical fieldwork in research on blogging by Brazilian favela residents, which combined analysis of digital texts with data collected on the practices involved in their production and circulation. Fieldwork is presented as a process and experience of “in-betweeness,” involving the crossing of imagined or real boundaries between humanities and social sciences ways of working, between cultural works and the human practices surrounding them, and between encounters on the internet and in person/in place. The discussion focuses on the negotiation of complex methodological and ethical issues relating to the status of bloggers as human subjects or authors, resulting from the dual focus on texts and practices in the context of digital culture.