Tulane University

Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Wendy Hunter, Professor of Government at the University of Texas in Austin, in which she will present her research on birth registration among low-income children in Brazil and Bolivia. Lunch will be served.

In many modern countries, the lack of appropriate birth certification often leaves individuals stateless and invisible. Not only is legal documentation a requirement for voting and having a bank account, but also having a registered birth is a precondition for gaining access to social services, such as health care and education. Many low income children in Brazil and Bolivia did not have a birth certificate until recently, effectively precluding them from achieving full citizenship. Wendy Hunter’s talk will examine why so many births in Brazil and Bolivia went undocumented historically and the circumstances under which improvements have taken place more recently.

Wendy Hunter, Ph.D. is Professor of Government at the University of Texas. A specialist on Brazil, she published The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, 1989-2009 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and co-edited (with Kurt Weyland and Raúl L. Madrid) Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings (Cambridge University Press, 2010.) Hunter’s early work focused on the Brazilian military during the transition from authoritarianism, resulting in the book Eroding Military Influence in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 1997). One aspect of her current research concerns social policy in contemporary Brazil. She has written extensively about the Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program aimed at reducing poverty and building human capital. She is also developing a broader project that aims at investigating the conditions under which countries issue birth certificates to all children, thereby providing them with an essential precondition for social inclusion and economic advancement. Wendy Hunter holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a
B.A. from Cornell University.
Click here for the event flyer.