Collaborative Research: Social Construction of Legal Exclusion in Slums

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates how legal exclusion is socially constructed in legally recognized vs. non-recognized slum settlements. Extensive research has demonstrated that residents of slum settlements globally have considerably worse outcomes on key social indicators, including poverty, employment conditions, and exposure to violence, than formally housed urban populations. Despite the recognition that legal status has significant impacts on the socioeconomic conditions of slum residents, little is known about why governments withhold official recognition and deny access to life-supporting infrastructure and residential security for slum residents. This research investigates how legal exclusion is constructed--as a political and bureaucratic entity, as a geographic and social reality, and as individual lived experience. It is also designed to explain how conditions vary in communities with different degrees of legal recognition and access. The project's three research aims are to identify the multi-level factors that produce the legal exclusion experienced by residents of non-recognized slums; demonstrate how legal exclusion is experienced as both a collective and individual level phenomenon that shapes the wellbeing of slum residents; and disentangle the effects of legal exclusions from other, more widely studied aspects of informal settlements, by comparing slum settlements with different administrative and legal contexts. The multi-level research design builds on insights from ethnographic research on social exclusion and political action in slums showing that legal exclusion is not only produced at the macro-level through policy and public discourse, but also at the community-level through negotiations with local administrators, police officers, and service delivery workers; and at the micro-level within the inner lives and subjective experiences of slum residents. This approach is rooted in longstanding efforts in sociology to integrate macro theories of social structure with micro-level analyses of social action to explain collective and individual outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.