Friederike Fleischer

Bio: Friederike Fleischer is an academic researcher from Max Planck Society. The author has contributed to research in topics: China & Beijing. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 17 publications receiving 149 citations. Previous affiliations of Friederike Fleischer include University of Los Andes.

Vivienda de interés social y pandemia en Colombia. Disrupciones en las formas de habitar

Abstract: La vivienda de interés social construida en la última década en Colombia muestra el recrudecimiento de la urbanización periférica que venía desde los años 90: series de conjuntos cerrados en áreas de expansión urbana desconectados de los centros, con problemas de acceso a bienes y servicios vitales, y con estrictas regulaciones de comportamiento en reglamentos de propiedad horizontal. En este artículo, resultado de una evaluación cualitativa y cuantitativa en cuatro regiones del país, mostramos las disrupciones sociales y económicas que trajo la pandemia a la vida de los residentes de estos conjuntos. Mostramos que la pandemia no solo afectó la vida cotidiana de los hogares y su situación económica, sino que también alteró las normas de convivencia: por un lado, se flexibilizaron las estrictas prohibiciones de actividad económica en las viviendas; por el otro, los protocolos de bioseguridad endurecieron restricciones que refuerzan las fronteras entre el adentro y afuera de los conjuntos. Analizar esta crisis de la propiedad horizontal periférica señala la importancia de repensar la organización de la vida colectiva en estas viviendas.

Bogotá street vendors using tutela as a sword: the symbolic power of law in practice

Abstract: Abstract In this article, we examine the efficacy of tutela, a legal injunction intended to give people easier access to the justice system in Colombia since 1991. Based on long-term ethnographic research with Bogotá street vendors, we show how structural barriers continue to present formidable obstacles to disadvantaged populations. This allows local leaders, who intervene on street vendors’ behalf in patron-client relationships, to gain political capital. Yet, once street vendors learnt about the (symbolic) power of the law, they skilfully appropriated the injunction to defend what they considered their rights. Focussing on people’s everyday practices, their ideas of law and the tutela injunction, the article contributes to debates about the ways in which structural and social factors condition access to legal tools and rights. At the same time, based on discussions about the effectiveness of litigation and insights from socio-legal research, we highlight the material and symbolic power of the law, underprivileged people’s agency in appropriating it, and its often-unintended effects. The research thus points beyond the formal-informal dichotomy of rules and norms, showing that the law’s efficacy goes beyond specific rulings and has to be understood in the wider cultural, economic and political context it occurs.

Young Chinese Volunteers: Self/Interest, Altruism, and Moral Models

Abstract: When Zhang Guiren1 arrived to our appointment, he was followed y a cameraman. I knew that Zhang had acquired a certain fame d public recognition, but I had not expected that he would turn our “informal chat” into a media spectacle. “It’s just to document what I am doing,” Zhang assured me upon noticing my apparently uncomfortable facial expression. “It’s going to be a documentary about my volunteer activities.” I was still not quite sure what to make of this. My confusion only grew when we sat down, and without prompting, Zhang opened a thick folder out of which he pulled a stack of local newspaper clippings documenting his “good deeds.” Putting one after the other in front of me, he told me about his efforts: how he had ceaselessly carried heavy bags of rice and flour, financed largely by his own means, to help poor people; how he volunteered more than 19 hours a day; how he had personally set up and managed a telephone help-line for young people in distress; how he had received distinctions for his efforts; and so on. All the while, the man with the camera was circling us, zooming in and out on our conversation. Eloquent and apparently “public relations” savvy, Zhang’s behavior and personality did not fit easily with my (maybe somewhat stereotypical) image of volunteers as selfless persons who more or less privately do good deeds for the benefit of others.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Abstract: Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

Abstract: COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.

Toward a Theory of Status Consumption in Less Industrialized Countries

Abstract: How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)—those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bourdieu’s status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu’s most important concepts—cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field—to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant textbook-like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy.