Erin
Murphy-Graham
“Para
Seguir Adelante : Women’s Empowerment and Education
in Honduras”
Women’s
empowerment is a common goal of development organizations and
donor agencies. However, we know relatively little about how
and why education might empower women. This presentation describes
results from a qualitative study that investigated the relationship
between an alternative secondary education program, the Sistema
de Aprendizaje Tutorial or SAT, and women’s empowerment
in Garífuna villages on the northern coast of Honduras
. Spanning grades 6-12, SAT provides educational opportunities
for adolescents and adults in rural areas who otherwise would
not have attended secondary school.
Erin
Murphy-Graham is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate
School of Education at UC Berkeley. Murphy-Graham has worked
as an education consultant in Honduras , Nicaragua and Colombia
and has co-authored articles on evaluation and policy influence,
gender and secondary education in Latin America.
Monday,
September 19, 12:00 – 1:15
pm
CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch Street
Analysis
and photos
of the event
Professor
Herbert Klein
“Popular
Mobilization and the State in Bolivia Today”
Professor
Klein will discuss the impact of the “Participación
Popular” reorganization of the state in the late 1990s;
the recent collapse of the traditional party system and the rise
of ethnic parties in the latest municipal and national elections;
and the origins and evolution of the recent popular protest movements.
Herbert S. Klein is Professor of History and Director of the
Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. He
is the author of several books on Bolivia: Parties and Political
Change in Bolivia, 1880-1952 (1969); Revolution
and the Rebirth of Inequality (co-author) (1981); Haciendas
and Ayllus (1993) and A Concise History of Bolivia (2003).
Among his other recent books are The American Finances of
the Spanish Empire, 1680-1809 (1998), The Atlantic Slave
Trade (1999), Slavery and the Economy of São
Paulo, 1750-1850 (co-author) (2003), and A
Population History of the United States (2004).
Monday,
October 10, 12:00 – 1:15 pm
CLAS Conference Room,
2334 Bowditch Street
Photos
of the event
Cori
Hayden
“Economies
of the Similar: Generic Drugs and the Question of Access in Mexico”
This talk addresses the recent emergence of generic drugs in Mexico, currently
Latin America’s biggest, and fastest growing, pharmaceutical market. Unlike
in Brazil, where antiretrovirals and HIV/AIDS treatment have been the centerpiece
of the powerful, state-led generics ‘revolution,’ in Mexico, the
promise of cheaper, generic medicines has made its strongest mark in the private
sector. This talk will focus on the rapidly growing pharmacy chain, Farmacias
de Similares, whose populist nationalism, affiliated laboratories, political
movements, health clinics and motto—“The same but cheaper”—have
begun to transform the face of health care provision in that country. With the
Similares phenomenon firmly in sight, Prof. Hayden will explore the specific
contours of Mexico ’s “pharmaceutical publics.”
Cori Hayden is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She received
her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held postdoctoral
fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the Center for U.S.–Mexican
Studies at UC San Diego. Prof. Hayden is the author of When Nature Goes Public:
The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton University
Press, 2003).
Monday,
October 24, 12:00 – 1:15 pm
CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch Street
Analysis
and photos
of the event
Peter Evans
“Counter-Hegemonic Globalization
and the Nation State: A
Brazilian Lens”
Globalization
is often seen as displacing the nation state from the center
of progressive politics. While it is true that alliances between
local and transnational social movements lie at the core of opposition
to the current neoliberal global regime, nation states — particularly
the major states of the global south — are also essential
actors in the politics of “counter-hegemonic globalization.” This
talk will use the case of Brazil to illustrate this proposition.
Peter Evans teaches in the Sociology Department at the University
of California , Berkeley , where he holds the Marjorie Meyer
Eliaser Chair of International Studies. He has worked for many
years on the comparative political economy of development, focusing
for most of those years on questions of industrial transformation,
as discussed in his 1995 book Embedded Autonomy. This
talk builds on his chapter on counter-hegemonic globalization
in the 2005 edition of the Handbook of Political Sociology.
Monday,
November 7, 12:00 – 1:15
pm
CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch Street
Photos of the event
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
“Human
Rights, Democracy and Citizenship in Northeast Brazil”
Death
squads are nothing new to the sugar plantation zone of rural
Northeast Brazil, an area with a long history of self-styled justiceiros — often
in the employ of the region’s sugar barons — taking
justice into their own hands. What requires some explanation
is the resurgence of extermination groups and death squads
in the neoliberal, democratic, civil rights-oriented decades
of the 1990s to the present day. In the plantation market town
of Timbauba a state of siege and political anarchy peaked in
the late 1990s when a particularly virulent death squad took
control of the municipio. An unanticipated turn of
events in 2001 led to the arrest of 14 gang members when a
small group of local activists joined forces with a fearless
judge and a tough-minded district attorney in a battle to wrest
the town from the vigilantes. In the past year, however, death
squad and vigilante attacks have resumed. Among the targets
today are journalists and members of the activist human rights
community themselves.
Nancy
Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.
She is best known for her award-winning books Saints, Scholars
and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland and Death
without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.
Monday,
November 14, 12:00 – 1:15 pm
CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch Street
Analysis and photos of the event
