Croft Visiting Speaker: Business Responses to Grassroots Activism in Latin America

Monday, March 2, 2015 - 7 p.m. - The Joseph C. Bancroft Conference Room (Croft 107) - Prof. Jeffrey Rubin, Boston University

On Monday, March 2, 2015, Prof. Jeffrey Rubin of Boston University will speak about the evolving ways businesses have responded to progressive reform in Latin America.  Until the 1990s, progressive movements in Latin America suffered violent repression sanctioned by the private sector and other socio-political elites. Prof. Rubin's research has demonstrated business responses to reform have become more open–ended as Latin America’s democracies have deepened, with repression tempered by the economic uncertainties of globalization, the political and legal constraints of democracy, and shifting cultural understandings of poverty and race.  The talk will be based on the findings of the Enduring Reform project (enduringreform.org) directed by Prof. Rubin and Prof. Vivienne Bennett of California State University San Marcos.

Jeffrey W. Rubin is Associate Professor of History and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University.  He received his A.B in Social Studies and Ph.D. in Political Science at Harvard.  A specialist on social movements, Rubin is the author of Decentering the Regime:  Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Duke 1997) and co-author of Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration (Duke 2013).  He is co-editor of Enduring Reform:  Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America’s Democracies (Pittsburgh 2014); â€œLived Religion and Lived Citizenship in Latin America’s Zones of Crisis,” (a forthcoming Special Issue of LARR, 2015); and Beyond Civil Society:  Social Movements, Civic Participation, and Democratic Contestation (forthcoming, Duke).  Rubin’s current project, â€œCitizen Subjectivities Reconfigured” examines how social movements, business, and religion have reshaped the ways people understand themselves as citizens and act politically in Latin America’s democracies.

300 Croft Dollars will be Awarded.