On Protest I: “Endemic crises and continuing protests in comparative and transnational perspective”

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

While protests have become normative in Latin America and other regions in recent years, the political significance of protest continues to be trivialized, and its efficacy understudied. Our proposed session is an effort to continue systematic reflection about protest politics, and the inclusion of comparative and transnational perspectives in the study of protest in the Latin American Studies Association. It would bring together junior and senior scholars coming from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, and focusing on different regions to 1) explore contested meanings of the continuing global protests, and 2) theorize shared themes of interest related to protest temporalities, notions of success and failure, non-human agency, and intersectional exclusions. The session includes new participants as well as members of the Tahrir Moments Research Group who participated in the LASA 2014 session “On Protest: Latin America in Comparative and Transnational Perspective” and the related Mellon-LASA seminar like Sonia E. Alvarez, Charles R. Hale, and Marina Sitrin.

Sub Track

• Civil Society and Social Movements

Session Organizers

• Sonia E Alvarez, University of Massachusetts/Amherst

• Martha Balaguera, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ivelisse Cuevas-Molina, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Chair

• Charles R Hale, University of Texas/Austin

Individual Presentations

• Discourses of crisis, structural adjustment, and protest in Latin America and Europe - Martha Balaguera, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Roberto Alejandro, University of Massachusetts

• Excluded Narrations and Emergen(t)cy Cultural Production: Recovering the history of Latino/a AIDS activism and protest in Philadelphia - Kevin Anthony Henderson, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Architectural Protest in El Alto: Freddy Mamani’s Challenge to Bolivia’s Lettered City - Tara A Daly, Mount Holyoke College

• Tesouras para Todas: Gender, Sexuality and Race in Brazil’s Protest Movements - Sonia E Alvarez, University of Massachusetts/Amherst

Discussant

• Millicent S Thayer, University of Massachusetts