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Free event: Trafficking in Trust: armoured cars in Guatemala City Wednesday 28th November, 18:30 - 20:00 at LSE, Vera Anstey Room Dozens of boutique auto-shops in Guatemala City fortify cars against varying levels of threat, from 9 mm pistols to military grade assault rifles. Mechanics line windows, wheels, and even skylights with bulletproof materials, promising an almost impenetrable vehicle amid a decidedly violent Central American city. In response to this growing confidence not just in Kevlar but also the intimacy of artisanal labour, this talk by Professor Kevin O'Neill engages the culture of armoured cars to open an ethnographic window into the imbrication of traffic and trust. As extended fieldwork evidences, mobile fortification reorients social relationships towards the imperative to trust-auto-shop owners, mechanics, and even the cars themselves-while also expanding the footprint of those who supposedly occupy the wrong side of a security wall. Professor O'Neill's talk will be followed by a discussion led by Dr Suzanne Hall and chaired by Dr Austin Zeiderman. Free registration at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trafficking-in-trust-armoured-cars-in-guatemala-city-tickets-50968858227 This event is part of a three-year international research collaboration on Traffic in the Americas<http://www.lse.ac.uk/lacc/research/Traffic-in-the-Americas>, which will explore the varied relationships between two different understandings of the word traffic. The first is vehicles moving on a road and the second is the trading in something illegal. The aim is to engage themes such as security, mobility, and infrastructure in the Americas from a novel perspective. The participating units include the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto<http://cdts.utoronto.ca/>, the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at the LSE, the Institute on Equality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles<https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/>, and the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo at the Universidad de los Andes<https://cider.uniandes.edu.co/paginas/home.aspx> (Bogotá, Colombia). ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CARIBBEAN-STUDIES list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CARIBBEAN-STUDIES&A=1