La ‘clase media’ and urban life in Buenos Aires: knowledge, critique, belonging

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel examines life in metropolitan Buenos Aires, taking as its optic the different kinds of knowledge that inform everyday notions of belonging and understandings of the state, of urban life, of labour, and of national political economy. The papers discuss economic knowledge, political knowledge and self-knowledge, showing how these are always open to critique and debate within contemporary cultural life and political action. Theorisations of concepts like inflation, sovereign debt, neoliberalism, precarity, justice and the self are central to cultural and political life in Buenos Aires, and to how porteños articulate their belonging to different communities at national, international, and local scales. We will explore how these concepts travel through everyday talk in different ethnographic contexts, and relate that to their travellings in other spheres such as the media, academia, and so on.

The papers are committed to analysing these articulations in the context of a discussion of class, where the ‘clase media’ is a category that must be interrogated and not taken for granted. Here we take inspiration from recent research in Argentina on the middle classes. The category ‘clase media’ is increasingly being recognised as precarious and unstable, as it incorporates a wide range of sociological positionings, and as people have also experienced impoverishment and a move in and out of a felt position ‘in the middle’ since 2001. As a discursive category it can also be exclusionary, and a means of claiming legitimacy for particular political stances and delegitimising others. Through our discussion of the circulation of political and economic knowledge we hope to interrogate these conceptual categories, and their exclusions and instabilities.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Chair

• Sian M Lazar, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Developing Economics: Inflation and Economic Knowledge in Argentina - Nicholas J Davella, The Cooper Union

• The Value of Money: Competing folk theories in the era of the dolar blue - Sarah B Muir, Barnard College, Columbia University

• The Meanings of Justice: Authoritative Knowledge and Lived Experience - Karen A Faulk, Carnegie Mellon University

• Café Talk: Affect, Psychoanalysis and Post-Neoliberal Urban Belonging in Buenos Aires - Noa Vaisman, Durham University

• Union responses to stability and precarity in state employment. Why do pay grades matter? - Sian M Lazar, University of Cambridge