The talk is moderated by Marcin Sliwa, PhD Research Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Oslo, currently doing research on planning and development in informal settlements in Buenos Aires. To provide context for Juan’s talk, Marcin will introduce the challenges and opportunities for urban development and mobility in Buenos Aires. He will also talk about recent research on working relations in Uber and similar sharing economy platforms in Norway by sociologist Sigurd M. N. Oppegaard.
Lecture abstract
When Uber arrived in Buenos Aires April 12, 2016, it framed itself as a complement to the taxi industry and as an “innovation”. Yet, an anxious for modernity segment of the middle class longing for an iconic cosmopolitanism saw Uber and the taxi industry as competitors locked in a structural opposition guaranteed, ultimately, by the company’s condition as an outsider, impervious to taxis’ “mafias” and other vices of Argentine public life. As an alleged economic solution to a political problem, the company’s business practices, its mythologised global “success”, and its seemingly unstoppable penetration of Buenos Aires generated the logics of an economic version of Sahlin’s stranger king: an outsider with its own motivations but “other” with respect to conflicts framed as political and local. In this talk Juan del Nido will examine the logics, rhetorics and affects that, regardless of their truth value or empirical consistency, consolidated the structural opposition framing these residents’ experience: one between economics, objectivity, and competition, on the one hand, and the political, the vitiated and monopolised on the other.
About the speaker
Juan del Nido is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Max Cam Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Originally trained as an economist, he worked as a political consultant in Buenos Aires before turning to social anthropology to study political and economic reasoning and the ethics of new technologies.
His work has been awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award for Research of Outstanding Merit and has been published by Economic Anthropology, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, The Anthropology of Work Review, and Hipertextos. He has produced policy recommendations for the Argentine Congress and the British Parliament and written opinion columns for Argentina’s national daily La Nacion. His book Taxis vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires, (Stanford U. Press, 2021) examining the conflict around Uber’s arrival in Argentina was awarded the Carol R. Ember Book Prize by the Society for Anthropological Sciences.