Latin America Social Mobilization

Catalog description

Certain social networks and types of social practice specialize in subverting the state and dominant society. In this class we look diffusely at social mobilization and focus on manifestations beyond social movements. We look at protest, at crime and violence, and at religion. The goal is to understand social history, or the way people who are not in positions of institutional power come together to change their world, sometimes to make the world better and sometimes to make it worse. Our goal is to develop sensibilities and analytic outlooks that allow us to understand these types of social mobilization as a way of understanding social change in Latin America, beyond the institutions that political scientists and economists tend to focus on.