CSUEB Professor and Students to Study Social Impact of Olympics on Rio de Janeiro
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- May 11, 2016
As the world prepares to watch its greatest athletes compete in the 31st annual Summer Olympic Games this August, Cal State East Bay professor Dr. Sukari Ivester is preparing for a different reason — to study the games. Specifically, the games’ effect on Rio de Janeiro, a city Ivester says has been long divided by staggering levels of inequality and social injustice.
Ivester and 20 undergraduate students will travel to Brazil this summer where she will teach two classes: “Continuity and Change in Brazilian Society” and “Contemporary Issues in Brazil.”
The classes, and her interest in the effect the Olympics will have on what Ivester calls the “Divided City,” stem from an international faculty development seminar she took in Rio two years ago with the Center for International Education and Exchange.
“I’m essentially modifying what I did with CIEE. Because it was such an amazing learning experience for me, I wanted to pass it on to my students,” Ivester said of the study abroad program.
She remembers that trip fondly, and says it was a turning point during which she began to see the city she’d come to love as a tourist from the perspective of an urban sociologist.
“There was then a hope that the Olympic moment would present the possibility of uplifting some of Brazil’s most vulnerable, but instead it seems to be exacerbating their vulnerability,” Ivester said.
For example, many low-income families have been forced from their homes to make room for Olympic structures, housing for athletes, parking lots and new highways. Another project — building cable cars for the favelas (poor communities built on steep hillsides) — costs millions of dollars that, according to Ivester, would have been better spent on providing access to sanitation, education and healthcare for these communities.
“Instead, the city has been insistent on these big 'white elephant' projects, but they really aren’t about the people who live there,” Ivester said.
“I’d like us to really keep in mind the significant and problematic impacts these mega-events have on the people who live in host cities.”