Apresentacao: situando o sujeito das periferias urbanas

The peripheries have been the object of a privileged study of urban sociology and anthropology in Brazil since the consolidation of these disciplines in the 1970s (Frúgoli Jr., 2005). Themes as varied as poverty, work, housing, religion, violence - and various forms of social mobilization - characterized the peripheries, simultaneously, as: a) a physical-geographical space in opposition to urban centers; b) an arena of sociability and cultural expression; and c) a cradle of political projects for the emancipation of less favored populations. Less problematized by Brazilian urban literature, the notion of subjectivity has only recently emerged to capture the individual experience of social, political, economic, historical and geographical processes that cross the formation of peripheral spaces. This dossier presents the results of recent research that take as a challenge to think the relationship between peripheries and subjectivity, or, as we call it here in the plural, peripheral subjectivities .