Márcio Moraes Valença

Visiting Scholar

Márcio Moraes Valença is a Professor of Public Policies at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil. With a BA in Architecture (DAU-UFPE, 1982); a Diploma in Urban Development (MDU-UFPE, 1988); an MA and a DPhil in Urban and Regional Studies (University of Sussex, 1990 and 1997), he has also spent two years as a Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1998-2000) and one year at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA, London) and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS, University of London, 2014). He has spent shorter periods of time at Witwatersrand University (South Africa, 2005) and the University of Lisbon (2012). He was Dean of Humanities at UFRN, from 2003 to 2011 and contributed to the set-up of several undergraduate and postgraduate programmes as well as a new department at UFRN. He has supervised 25 MPhil and DPhil theses. He has been in the editorial boards of journals, like Geoforum, GOT, Cadernos Metrópole and Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais. His publications include books and papers in Portuguese and in English.

Participating Years

2015–2016

Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?