Speakers: ...

Speaker: Timo Schaefer, Adjunct Professor, Brandeis University, Department of History; Boston University, Pardee School of Global Studies

Moderator: Kirsten Weld, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences

In the nineteenth century, Mexicans faced the challenge of constructing republican legal institutions in a society shaped by centuries of colonial rule. This talk examines how people attempted to meet that challenge in towns and in hacienda (agricultural estate) settlements. More broadly, it analyzes in what...

Speaker: Mariano Sánchez-Talanquer, Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

This study examines why revolutionary...

Speaker:  Gautam Rao: Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University

What sorts of research findings do policymakers demand? What is the impact of providing them with such information? We answer these questions using experiments with mayors in Brazil.

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Speaker:  Camila Pereira, Education Policy Director, Lemann Foundation

Brazil approved in 2017 two major education policies: Base Nacional Comum Curricular and Educação Conectada ("National Learning Standards" and "Connected Education"). In this talk, we intend to discuss the potential and challenges of these new policies to reduce education...

Speaker:  George Avelino, Associate Professor, Department of Social and Legal Sciences, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-RJ)

The presentation introduces a new index of electoral concentration with data that includes all candidates for federal deputy for elections that occurred between 1994 and 2014 throughout Brazil. Results showed that successful...

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Speaker: Stanley A. Gacek, Senior Advisor for Global Strategies, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW)

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Speaker: Hiram Ramirez-Rangel, Divisional Executive Vice-President and Co-Branch Manager of AXA Advisors, LLC, Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico’s current financial and economic crisis is examined firstly by examining the geopolitical dynamics that once sustained its role as an American exclave, and which gradually changed, giving way to a period of decline in strategic importance. As its importance as exclave began to decline, the Island turned to both external and internal sources of financing to mitigate or defer economic and financial adjustment...

Speaker: Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government; Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

Responsibility constitutes a thread running through a number of topical public policy subjects, including sovereignty-as-responsibility, corporate social responsibility, and common but differentiated responsibility within environmental policy. Nowhere has attention to responsibilities been more prominent, however, than in the realm of human rights protection...

Speaker: Ben Ross Schneider, Ford International Professor of Political Science, MIT; Director of the MIT-Brazil Program

Access to education in Latin America expanded rapidly in recent decades, but education quality still lags. To tackle the quality challenge, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Mexico, and some states in Brazil enacted in the 2010s ambitious and promising reforms, often in the face of fierce opposition, especially from teacher unions and clientelist politicians. Reform outcomes though varied widely depending on the strength of support coalitions in civil...

Speaker: Lorenza B. Fontana, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program. Research Associate, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Politics and International Studies, Open University

What are the effects of identity politics on social justice? How do these politics impact multiethnic societies and communities beyond the specific groups they target? And how have they...

Speaker: Andrew Schrank, Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University

When the Dominican Republic (DR) entered a free trade agreement (CAFTA) with the United States and Central America in the early twenty-first century, the country’s pharmaceutical makers worried that...

Speaker: Kenneth Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University

Many scholars have drawn distinctions between left-leaning, so-called “inclusionary” populism in Latin America and right-wing “exclusionary” populism in Europe. The recent rise of left populisms in the aftermath of Southern Europe’s financial crisis, however, has strong parallels to the Latin American experience, and it casts doubt on any notion that different sub-types of populism have strict geographic determinants. It calls, instead, for a more...