Upcoming Events

The goal of "Junot Díaz: A Symposium" is to assess the literary and cultural significance of Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican American writer Junot Díaz. Junot Díaz’s short fiction, novel, essays, and interviews are changing the landscape of Américan imaginaries. In hosting this event, we are bringing scholars working within the paradigms of Latina/o literary and cultural studies into conversation with those working on immigrant and diasporic cultures to appraise what we consider an emergent dialogue in the fields of Latina/o, Latin American, and U.S. critical studies. Participants are both established and emergent scholars who come from a variety of universities, departments, and field-imaginaries.

Our schedule consists of four roundtables and a CCSRE Kieve Distinguished Address given by Junot Díaz. The roundtables will address the separate but interrelated themes of the symposium: the place of Junot Díaz’s trans-American fiction and essays in 21st-century Américan literatures and cultures; the planetary forces animating his texts; the continued and perhaps resurgent significance of race, latinidad, gender, sexuality, ability, and poverty as analytic and experiential categories in his fiction and essays. In opting for a roundtable format, our aim is for the symposium to proceed less as a series of monologues and more as a series of dialogues and debates that develop over the course of our two days together.

What drives financial market volatility in developing countries? And how do financial markets understand the uncertainty inherent in democratic policy making? This talk will explore the link between democratic contestation over economic policy making and the volatility of financial markets in Brazil and Mexico during the 1990s and early 2000s. While the literature has tended to see a link between financial market volatility and periods such as elections and government change, little attention has been paid to the way that financial markets price the uncertainty that surrounds the day to day process of economic policy making. In countries where the policy making process is characterized by a high degree of contestation amongst domestic political actors, and where investors have a “pro-reform” bias, the markets will react strongly to the changing prospect of economic reform. By focusing on Brazil and Mexico, two large Latin American economies with similar trajectories of economic reform and differing levels of political contestation, I will demonstrate how the democratic process serves as an ongoing source of financial market volatility, and articulate some preliminary lessons to the ongoing European sovereign debt crisis.

Lauren Phillips is an Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the London School of Economics. She graduated from Stanford University in 2000 with a BA in International Relations and Latin American Studies, and an MA in International Policy Studies. She completed her PhD in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics in 2006, and her dissertation received the British International Studies Association award for 2006. Her research focuses on the interaction between democratic politics and financial market performance in Latin America and more recently, Europe. She is interested in politics of sovereign debt and the role of domestic politics in the provocation and resolution of financial crises. Dr Phillips joined the LSE faculty in 2008 after working for several years at a British think tank focused on development policy, and has previous work experience in the financial industry, as a political risk consultant and in the not-for-profit sector.

This conversation will focus on the relations between Brazilian popular music and citizenship, and will be based on a recently published volume that I coedited with Christopher Dunn at Duke University Press, Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship. My emphasis will not be on the representation of the theme of citizenship in lyrics, but rather on how diverse claims and alternative notions of citizenship have been elaborated through musical production itself. From the 19th-century percussion by former slaves to contemporary forms of re-Africanized carnival in Bahia, music has been a key element for black citizenship in Brazil. On the other hand, music has operated to foreclose and discipline, rather than open up citizens' experiences, as in Getúlio Vargas' regime's use of orpheonic chant to produce obedient young subjects at elementary schools, a project directed by Villa-Lobos, Brazil's most celebrated classical composer. Music has often been a space of negotiation with power as well, a place for political intersections the meanings of which are not given in advance. Two examples are samba's position in the 1930s/40s as a genre both promoted and demoted, celebrated and censored by Getúlio Vargas' authoritarian administration, or the ambiguous status of the acoustic, refined musics known as MPB during the 1960s/70s dictatorship, when those musics expressed democratic hopes and aspirations like no other, but also promoted an exclusionary conception of middle-class good taste. The presentation will, then, revolve around the relevance of popular music as a major stage in which real and symbolic forms of citizenship have been enacted in Brazil.

Despite some improvement since the mid-1990s, social and economic inequality is still very high in Brazil, and both reflect and reinforce differences in schooling. In turn, part of the educational inequality stems from the segmentation in the educational system. Because of a strong economic segregation, children from different backgrounds are not exposed to similar educational experiences. As a result, there is a large academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor. The privileged groups quasi-monopolize the schooling paths that lead to the best universities, and the material and symbolic benefits they obtain by doing so are enormous. In this talk, I present the main results of my research on the segmentation of the Brazilian educational system. Drawing on ethnographic studies of five schools, as well as on in-depth interviews with parents and students of different ages and backgrounds, I show how economic segregation contributes to the intergenerational transmission of social inequality. I will also discuss some public-policy implications of these results.

Ana Maria Fonseca de Almeida is Associate Professor at the University of Campinas in São Paulo. She is also a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and co-director of the Study Group on the School Institution and Family Organizations (Focus). Her research addresses the relationship between education and inequality, focusing on the intergenerational tranmission of social inequalities in contemporary Brazil. Professor Fonseca de Almeida has recently published A Escola dos Dirigentes Paulistas (2009), on elite education in São Paulo, and co-edited A Escolarização das Elites (2002), an international collection of studies on elite education, as well as Circulação Internacional e Formação Intelectual das Elites Brasileiras, on the impact of international circulation on the intellectual formation of Brazilian elites. She has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. She is co-editor of the journal Pro-Posições and a member of the Editorial Board of Educação e Sociedade and Sociologia da Educação. Professor Fonseca de Almeida will be in residence at Stanford from July 2011 through June 2012.