5: What Favelas can Teach about Leadership: The Importance of Shared-Purpose and Place-Based Leadership

The aim of this chapter is to examine the leadership practices in the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil. According to the United Nations Report (2014), one in eight people live in slums. In total, around one billion people live in slum conditions today around the world. Favelas have been portrayed as spaces of exclusion that are commonly associated with marginality and segregation (Imas & Weston, 2012), or the geographical spaces that epitomize the great socioeconomic divide in Brazilian society (Hughes, 2012). Yet, favela residents have engaged in “try[ing] to appropriate the mechanisms of producing their own representations of themselves and the world” (Hamburger, 2008, p. 201), from a periphery that produces not only culture, but also a critical discourse on racism, police violence, and poverty to rival that of mainstream media (Holmes, 2016).