This course offers students the chance to explore the rich diversity
of grassroots politics and social movements within contemporary Latin
America. The course will introduce students to various kinds of Latin
American social movements, provide an overview of the possible
theoretical approaches to understand them, and equip students to
undertake a rigorous comparative analysis of them. While by no means
comprehensive in scope, the course will entail an explicitly
comparative framework based on readings and a few films. We will
divide our attention between five prominent analytical categories of
political and social action to examine how different social movements
articulate such categories while inhabiting different national,
cultural, and historical contexts within Latin America. These five
analytics represent a relevant foundation on which to base our
comparative exploration into social movements and correspond
significantly to the ways in which people live and articulate their
socio-political realities. These domains are:
ethnicity/race, gender, resources, human rights, and the environment.
One of the essential things we will learn in the course is how and why
these comparative analytical domains frequently intersect.
The course is a joint undergraduate/graduate class and the readings
and requirements are divided accordingly.