"Praga de Mãe: Risk Engagement, Transitional Dynamics, and Regulation by the Mother's Curse in a Violent Brazilian City"

This dissertation explores two regulative mechanisms that comes to forth through the conflict between two generations – the parent generation who lived with the dictatorship in Brazil, and their children who were born into and grew up in the democratic Brazil. The two generations have different anticipations to roles in the modern Brazil and this gives itself in phenomena that gains its strength from the insecure and violent public spaces and from a type of magical thinking. The main argument is how one of the mechanisms vertically differentiates and distributes roles and expectations through demands and unnegotiable offers. It presents a dilemma where the ideal parent-child relation, based on unconditional love, is weakened by the parents’ demands and expectations to the child, and is problematized through the impossibility of denying dependency. This somewhat dysfunctional relation introduces two choices to the child where both outcomes confirms the conditionality of the parent-child relation. Hence, the phenomenon reaffirms and strengthens itself. The other mechanism plays on the latter mechanism beyond the border of the domestic sphere, and as such presents a bilateral differentiation between family ties and self-developing activities in the public sphere. The two mechanisms propose a system that calibrates itself in the break between tradition and social development. These two paradoxes and seeming contradictions are interpreted within a transitional model where the two mechanisms introduce a delay into the possibility of progress.