Imaginários da insegurança: segurança privada e vida cotidiana nas cidades de Pelotas e Rio Grande – RS

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the relationship between insecurity imaginaries and transformations of everyday life and the urban landscape in the cities of Pelotas and Rio Grande - RS. Using a qualitative approach that fits the so-called case study design and combines several strategies and techniques of data collection from an ethnographic perspective, e.g. systematic observation, questionnaire and unstructured interviews, this research analyzes the re-significances of social imaginaries that come from the culture of fear and surveillance to account, on the one hand, of the changes in daily life and, consequently, in the sociability in those cities; and, on the other hand, the incorporation of securitization dispositives into the urban landscape. These transformations take place within the scope of private security that reflects, at the same time as it structures the meanings that make up the imaginaries, based on the valuations and moralities that accompany the consumption dynamics of these dispositives, as a strategy that individuals use to protect themselves and take care. Finally, it offers considerations that based on a focus centered on the symbolic and material expressions observed in the cities of Pelotas and Rio Grande, serve to theorize and leave open questions about the issue of insecurity and contemporary society.