Box 1916

Maxcy Hall

112 George Street

Providence, RI 02912

Telephone: (401) 863-2367

Fax: (401) 863-3213

Sociology@brown.edu

 

Contact Information:
Brown University
Department of Sociology
Box 1916
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone (Brown): (401) 863-3617
Fax: (401) 863-3213
e-mail: Omar_Pereyra@brown.edu

Year of Entry: 2007
PhD Expected: 2012

Previous Degrees:
B.A. in Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2000)
M.A. in Social Sciences, The University of Chicago (2006)

Areas of Interest:
Urban Sociology, Social Stratification and Inequality, Sociology of Culture, Political Economy

Research interests/questions:

My research tries to understand, from the actor’s point of view and in a relational perspective, how differences and communities are created and/or dissolved inside a place. In that sense, my research wants to improve our understanding of places not only as heterogeneous, but also as intrinsically changing environments according to different situations which can occur at different scales (local, district, metropolitan, or global). In order to achieve this goal, my research project tries to integrate Urban Ecology, Urban Political Economy, and the promising theory on Social Boundaries. Three questions guide my research: (1) how do social characteristics contribute (or not) to the creation of symbolic and social boundaries?; (2) how social boundaries are activated and deactivated along processes or threats of urban transformation?; and (3) how the deactivation of internal social boundaries into a single block or coalition can lead to a broader conception of a broader community, and possibly to a sense of responsibility among groups?

I conduct my research in the district of Barranco in the city of Lima, Perú; which is a socially and economically highly heterogeneous place; which at the same time faces transformations ranging from the privatization of public spaces, criminality, densification, gentrification, and the implementation of a new transformation system for the city of Lima what will cut the district in two. These transformations not only have different interpretations by the different groups that live in this district and consequently different position regarding them; but also make them organize different inter-group coalitions.

For my Master’s thesis, I studied the urban form, the urbanization process, and the model of residential segregation of the city of Lima, Perú. For this research I used the database of the 1993 Peruvian National Census for spatial analysis with ArcGIS.  I think that this research provides several features that can be generalized to other Latin American cities. I am looking forward to compare these results with those of the 2007 Census to detect recent spatial transformations in Lima.