Jaime Alves

Vice Chair and Associate Professor

Office Location

Room 3715 South Hall

Bio

Jaime A. Alves holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to UCSB, he taught Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Politics at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and was a visiting professor in the Center for African Diaspora Studies at Universidad Icesi, in Colombia. He is the author of The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Professor Alves' current research focuses on the geopolitics of policing and black spatial insurgency in Colombia and Brazil. More specifically, he is interested in making ethnographically visible how black life is sustained and lived in the intersections of infrastructural violence, imperial policing, and broad urban security dynamics in Santiago de Cali (Colombia) and São Paulo (Brazil). At the core of his long-term political project, which he names as Blackscapes, is to locate and interpret forms of (black) ungovernability and mundane experiments of freedom - such as gang territorialities, informal housing settlements, bus fare-evasion, drug-dealing, retaliatory acts of violence against the police, and countless self-help-initiatives - that challenge the security state and that create conditions for Black sovereignty. For more information, visit his personal digital repository at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com