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Valuation assemblages within informal markets in the global south: the case of urban piracy in Recife, Brazil

Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN Conference paperpeer-review

Published
Publication date6/04/2016
Number of pages15
<mark>Original language</mark>English
Event6th Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies - Viña del Mar, Chile
Duration: 6/04/20169/04/2016

Conference

Conference6th Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies
Country/TerritoryChile
CityViña del Mar
Period6/04/169/04/16

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider how valuation is performed within informal markets in the global south. Specifically, the paper addresses this topic with reference to empirical data garnered from an ethnographic study of urban piracy markets in Recife, Brazil. These markets are composed of piracy hawkers - street sellers using mobile piracy stalls equipped with a CD player, car battery and speakers, who walk the streets playing and selling copied CDs. Overall we seek to explain how the evaluation of music media products is entangled with the informal urban assemblages of piracy markets. We draw on Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature on assemblages and specifically moments of valuation (Antal et al 2015) and argue that the valuation of music media is spatially and temporally located and collectively performed as a contingent process that takes place within the informal assemblages of people, materials and technologies which daily emerge on the crowded sidewalks. In this context, valuation is collectively enacted and the dissonance in relation to new musical products is collectively negotiated trough the inscription of sonorous boundaries of belonging and difference that shape the spatiality and collective identity of urban daily life in Recife.