Global Metropolitan Studies: December 2025 Newsletter

[Globalmetrostudies Departmental]

GLOBAL METROPOLITAN STUDIES December 2025 Newsletter News        Events        Research Spotlight NEWS Student group grants applications open! Interested in exploring urban themes with a group of doctoral students across different departments? Apply to form a GMS student group!  Our call for applications is now open on the GMS website.  Funding of up to $1500 available.   Send us elective course ideas Every year, faculty create new urban-themed courses.  Please let us know if you would like your course (or a course you have taken as a doctoral student) to count as an elective for the GMS Designated Emphasis. Please use this form to let us know about the course.   GMS Alum Jennifer Tucker publishes book! GMS Alum Jennifer Tucker (Associate Professor, Community and Regional Planning, University of New Mexico) has recently published Outlaw Capital, an ethnography of the contraband economy in Ciudade del Este, Paraguay.   Send us your news! EVENTS GMS DE Practice Job Talk on Social Housing in Brazil: DCRP Ph.D. Candidate Flavia Leite Flavia Leite, UC Berkeley December 1, 2025 1:30-3:00 pm 106 Bauer Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley On Monday, December 1st, GMS DE Candidate Flavia Leite will give a practice job talk titled "Debt and Dwelling: Residential Outcomes and Governance in Brazil’s Social Housing." The talk will be at Bauer Wurster 106, 1:30-3:00pm. No RSVP required. RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT GMS DE alum Jennifer Tucker   GMS DE alum Jennifer Tucker (Associate Professor, Community and Regional Development, University of New Mexico), explores how places and practices construed as informal, illegal or lawless buttress networks of elite power and produce different kinds of urban spaces. Methodologically, she uses feminist ethnography and archival analysis to understand how urban inequality is produced, maintained and contested, expanding the research gaze beyond the poor to investigate how the economic practices and value systems of elite actors reproduce inequality. Much of her research has been centered on Paraguay. She also engages intellectual and activist projects in Albuquerque, New Mexico on themes of poverty, policing, anti-racism and abolition. Her new book Outlaw Capital: Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development was published by the University of Georgia Press in fall 2023 in the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series. An ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, it shows how transgressive economies and grey spaces are central to globalized capitalism. A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars’ worth of consumer goods—everything from cell phones to whiskey—providing cheap transit to Asian manufacturers and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. A vibrant popular economy of Paraguayan street vendors and Brazilian “ant contrabandistas” capture some of the city’s profits, contesting the social distribution of wealth through an insurgent urban epistemology of use, need and care. Yet despite the city’s centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal and lawless place. GLOBAL METROPOLITAN STUDIES University of California, Berkeley Our mailing address is: globalmet...@berkeley.edu Website: https://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/