Details

Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment
Spring 2023 || Spatial Storytelling
Stigma, public space, and the symbolic value of race in Cartagena, Colombia
with
Melissa Valle, Princeton-Mellon / Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Fellow
and
Frederick Wherry, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University
This is a hybrid event. Click below to register in advance for this Zoom webinar:
https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DJPOA6D_QVmeU3bhZjPMNg
Institutions rely not only on seemingly valorizing culture- and ethnicity-led development strategies, but ones simultaneously rooted in reifying and damaging narratives and visual depictions of racialized groups and geographies. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis, and iconography, Valle examines how social actors in the rapidly changing urban locale of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, evaluate, shift, and legitimate racial value. Through the narratives and imagery of development stakeholders attempting to shift regional stigma, and those of news and social media outlets who justify both the removal and “formalization” of informal street vendors, we see how visual culture and aesthetics affect and reflect how people understand racial value. The racial hierarchy is maintained symbolically through racial representation by the media and government who shape how the broader society understands the roles and viability of Black people in the labor market, and materially through public policy decisions that govern public space and determine the access that primarily Black street vendors have to the physical spaces of the city where they seek to informally earn their livelihoods.
The Spring 2023 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Program in Latin American Studies, Center for Collaborative History, Departments of Art & Archaeology and English, HMEI, PIIRS, SPIA, and the School of Architecture.
Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Boxed lunches are available while supplies last.