Collaborative Research: Social Construction of Legal Exclusion in Slums

本项目探讨法律排斥是如何在法律认可与非法律认可的贫民窟住区中被社会建构的。广泛的研究表明，在全球范围内，与正式居住的城市人口相比，贫民窟住区居民在贫困、就业条件和遭受暴力等关键社会指标方面的结果要差得多。尽管人们认识到法律地位对贫民窟居民的社会经济条件有重大影响，但人们对政府为何拒绝正式承认并拒绝贫民窟居民获得维持生命的基础设施和住房安全知之甚少。本研究探讨了法律排斥是如何构建的——作为一种政治和官僚实体，作为一种地理和社会现实，以及作为个人生活经验。它还旨在解释在不同程度的法律承认和获取途径的社区中情况如何不同。该项目的三个研究目标是：确定导致未被承认的贫民窟居民遭受法律排斥的多层次因素；证明法律排斥是如何作为一种集体和个人层面的现象来经历的，这种现象塑造了贫民窟居民的福祉；并通过比较不同行政和法律背景下的贫民窟住区，将法律排斥的影响与非正式住区的其他更广泛研究的方面分开。多层次的研究设计建立在对贫民窟社会排斥和政治行动的民族志研究的见解之上，表明法律排斥不仅通过政策和公共话语在宏观层面产生，而且通过与当地行政人员、警察和服务提供人员的谈判在社区层面产生；在微观层面贫民窟居民的内心生活和主观体验。这种方法植根于社会学的长期努力，将社会结构的宏观理论与社会行动的微观分析相结合，以解释集体和个人的结果。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project investigates how legal exclusion is socially constructed in legally recognized vs. non-recognized slum settlements. Extensive research has demonstrated that residents of slum settlements globally have considerably worse outcomes on key social indicators, including poverty, employment conditions, and exposure to violence, than formally housed urban populations. Despite the recognition that legal status has significant impacts on the socioeconomic conditions of slum residents, little is known about why governments withhold official recognition and deny access to life-supporting infrastructure and residential security for slum residents. This research investigates how legal exclusion is constructed--as a political and bureaucratic entity, as a geographic and social reality, and as individual lived experience. It is also designed to explain how conditions vary in communities with different degrees of legal recognition and access.The project's three research aims are to identify the multi-level factors that produce the legal exclusion experienced by residents of non-recognized slums; demonstrate how legal exclusion is experienced as both a collective and individual level phenomenon that shapes the wellbeing of slum residents; and disentangle the effects of legal exclusions from other, more widely studied aspects of informal settlements, by comparing slum settlements with different administrative and legal contexts. The multi-level research design builds on insights from ethnographic research on social exclusion and political action in slums showing that legal exclusion is not only produced at the macro-level through policy and public discourse, but also at the community-level through negotiations with local administrators, police officers, and service delivery workers; and at the micro-level within the inner lives and subjective experiences of slum residents. This approach is rooted in longstanding efforts in sociology to integrate macro theories of social structure with micro-level analyses of social action to explain collective and individual outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.