Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico's Disappeared

Date: 

Tuesday, March 22, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:20pm


For a recording of this event, please click here.

Speaker: Janice Gallagher, Assistant Professor in Political Science, Rutgers University
Discussant: Kaitlyn Chriswell, PhD Candidate in Government, Harvard University
Moderated by: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University

Janice Gallagher is an Assistant Professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark, and during AY 2021-22, she is a Democracy Visiting Faculty Fellow at Harvard University's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Janice specializes in comparative politics with a focus on state-society relations and human rights in Latin America. Her first book, Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico’s Disappeared (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) explores how mobilized citizens erode impunity in cases of disappearances in Mexico. Janice was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University, and holds a PhD in government from Cornell University, and a master's degree in teaching from Brown University.

Kaitlyn Chriswell is a PhD Candidate in the Government Department at Harvard University. She studies political violence and criminal groups with a particular emphasis on citizen-state relations. Her dissertation book project examines how the local presence of criminal groups affects whether and how citizens interact with the state through a mixed-methods study of municipalities across Mexico. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard. She is a current Graduate Student Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government. She specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, political representation, political economy, and religion and politics. Hagopian is author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (2014, Cambridge University Press), editor of Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), co-editor (with Scott Mainwaring) of The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge 2005), and author of Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her current work focuses on the establishment of a social welfare regime in Brazil, and the political economy of inequality in Latin America. She previously taught at the University of Notre Dame, where she was Director of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, as well as Tufts and Harvard Universities. She has also been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs