#  Policing Disappearance: Missing People, Mass Graves and Debt in Democratic Brazil 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **February 22, 2023** 

 12:00PM - 01:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **S216, CGIS South**  



 

 



 

 Speaker: **Graham Denyer-Willis**, Director of Studies in Geography and Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies, Queens College, University of Cambridge  
Moderated by: **Diane Davis**, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism

 A political ethnographer, **Graham’s** research and teaching is concerned with practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, as they work through cities, institutions and informality. He approaches these questions from historical and contemporary Brazil, to question how direct and indirect forms of violence and social organisation matter in the production and maintenance of political authority in space. He is especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, globally. He is the author of two books, both published by the University of California Press. His first book, *The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil* (2015), accompanies homicide detectives in São Paulo as they negotiate an incipient organised crime group and police who kill 2.3 times per day. He argues for a conceptualisation of organised crime as ‘nested’ in the state’s regulation of life and death, and rooted in a shared understanding of which kinds of killings matters, where and why in the city. His second book, *Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil* (2022), examines how and why 20,000 – 25,000 people go missing, per year, in São Paulo. *Keep the Bones Alive* explores this phenomenon and why there is little concern for those who vanish. he accompanies family members, state workers, and gravediggers to examine the rationalization underpinning why bodies are missing in space including cemeteries, the criminal coroner’s office, and prisons. By following the bereaved as they confront an indifferent state and suspicious society and search for loved ones against all odds, this book reveals where missing bodies go and the reasons why people can disappear without being pursued. Recognizing that disappearance has long been central to Brazil’s everyday political order, with some people pursued and others not, this humanistic account of the silences surrounding disappearance shows why a demand for a politics of life is needed more than ever.

 **Diane E. Davis** is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Before moving to the GSD in 2011, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also had a term as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist, Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, urban violence, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty. Her books include *Transforming Urban Transport* (with Alan Altshuler) (Oxford University Press, 2018), *Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm* (Indiana University Press, 2011), *Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America* (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology), *Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation* (Cambridge University Press, 2003), *Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century* (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). A prior recipient of research fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute for Peace, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Davis recently authored a study of Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, prepared for USAID, which examines the coping and adapting strategies adopted by citizens and authorities to push back against violence in seven cities around the world. She has just completed two separate initiatives, for which she was Principal Investigator: a three year project funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) focused on the role of political leadership in transforming urban transport and a three year project funded by Mexico’s national workers’ housing agency (INFONAVIT) oriented toward developing more sustainable social housing policies for Mexican cities. Founder and curator of the Mexican Cities Initiative at Harvard’s GSD, Davis is Chair of the David Rockefeller Center’s Faculty Committee on Mexico, member of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) Executive Committee, and a contributing editor for the US Library of Congress, Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Mexico). She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, City and Community, and the Journal of Latin American Studies.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Brazil Studies ](/programs-initiatives/brazil-studies)
 
 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)
 


 Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.drclas.harvard.edu/node/1474466/event-feed.ics)  Copy link link