My research explores how the interactions between media and political systems affect processes of democratization, with a focus on Brazil. My Ph.D. dissertation, which resulted in my first book (Televisão e política no Brasil: A Rede Globo e as interpretações da audiencia, E-Papers, 2007), analyzes the reception and impact of television news and telenovelas on viewers’ interpretations of political issues in Brazil. In 2002, I received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Brazilian Society of Interdisciplinary Communication Studies (INTERCOM). Since then, my research has explored a variety of communication practices and genres, including journalism, television fiction, political advertising, public health campaigns, and social media. My second book (Media power and democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the dilemmas of political accountability, Routledge, 2012) analyzes the role of TV Globo, Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, in the first two decades of the country’s process of democratization (1985-2006). Based on content analysis of television news and telenovelas, as well as on interviews with key political actors, including four former presidents, the book explores how the interactions between television, democratization, and civil society mobilization have shaped the quality of political accountability in Brazil. My work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Journalism, Media, Culture and Society, Political Communication, and Television and New Media.

Between January 2011 and July 2013, I worked as Program Officer for Media Rights and Access at the Ford Foundation office in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In that capacity, I oversaw a portfolio of grants that supported civil society groups and other organizations working on media reform and freedom of expression in Brazil.

My current research and book project analyze the role of the media in the process of democratic decay that Brazil has experienced since 2013. More specifically, I look at the role of communication processes in the rise of the far-right, which culminated in the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. My analysis looks at how a significant middle-class mobilization emerged in opposition to the process of social inclusion that took place in the first decade of the 21st Century, when Brazil experienced a significant decline in poverty and social inequality levels. Based on the analysis of mainstream media representations about race, gender, and class, I argue that stigmatizing representations of groups that had been partially incorporated (the so-called “new middle class”) are central to understand Brazil’s contemporary shift to the right. Such representations have contributed to strengthen middle-class resentment about the process of social inclusion and have fostered the rise of a new conservative movement.

Erika Pettersen graduated in May 2020 with a Master’s degree from the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Prior to her studies at Tulane, she earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Amherst College and a certificate in Arts & Culture Strategy from the University of Pennsylvania. She has also completed post baccalaureate coursework in Studio Art & Art History at Brooklyn College. Erika’s diverse educational pursuits have informed her work as a photographer, curator, and arts administrator with a wide range of New York City-based organizations and independent artists.

Analyzing media, literature, and material culture related to Mexican mestizaje, Erika’s research at the Stone Center has focused on concepts of identity and belonging through the lenses of race and gender. Alongside her academic work, Erika served as President of the Latin Americanist Graduate Organization (LAGO) and coordinated the first LAGO Symposium on Community-Engaged Scholarship in February 2020. On April 15th, 2020, she defended her thesis, entitled “The Image of la india in Oaxaca, Mexico: Forging Afro-descendant Visibility and Trans -modern Indigeneity at the 2019 Guelaguetza,” with distinction.

Liat joins her fellow Stone Center cohort after two years in Peace Corps Guatemala where she worked with local farmers and elementary schools to design and implement a regional school meal program based on locally available produce and a traditional Ixil diet. Liat‘€™s academic interest in agricultural development and food systems extends back to her undergraduate years at Tulane when she had the opportunity to travel to both Thailand and India to conduct research on ecofeminist alternatives to industrial and capitalist-informed agricultural development. Liat‘€™s fieldwork led to an award-winning honors thesis and the opportunity to host and introduce Dr. Vandana Shiva, a renowned scholar and activist of food and seed sovereignty, at a Tulane-sponsored community lecture. For her MA thesis project, Liat aspires to continue building on her Food Studies research by conducting ethnographic work with Ixil farmers living in Guatemala and the US. Liat is also a recipient of a Mellon Fellowship in community engaged scholarship and believes strongly in the power of activist scholarship to transform and empower communities.

Hannah Palmer, who joined the staff in 2019, oversees summer abroad initiatives and academic-year programming at both the Stone Center and the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute. Before coming to Tulane, she worked in Latin American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served as Graduate Program Coordinator for the Institute for the Study of the Americas, Resident Director for the Yucatec Maya Summer Institute, and a teaching fellow of Spanish-language and English-literature courses while completing her Ph.D. Her interests include contemporary Maya literatures, critical Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, contemporary Latinx literatures, and interdisciplinary and decolonial methodologies. In her research, teaching, and administrative work alike, she enjoys exploring new areas of inquiry and forums of instruction.

Isabel E. Owen is a first year MA student in Latin American Studies and a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow for Portuguese. Isabel completed her undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Geneseo where she double majored in Creative Writing and History and minored in Latin American Studies. She was a Gilman Scholar and Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Brazil in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Interested in comparative cultural studies and discourse analysis, Isabel researches the way political power is expressed through cultural artifacts over time, ranging from the archive to the Internet. In the same vein, she is especially interested in the discourse that led to the rise of the right in Brazil and the United States. Separate from her MA studies, Isabel is interested in poetry and poetics and the way language frames our senses and the world around us.

Since July 2013, I have been an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research and the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. My research explores the quality of democracy and representation in new democracies. I focus on electoral behavior and how certain practices—such as patronage, clientelism, and corruption—threaten democratic accountability by conditioning citizens’ behavior and electoral choices. Empirically, my research examines these issues in Latin America, where I collect original quantitative and qualitative data. Methodologically, I employ a variety of methods including surveys, survey experiments, statistical analysis, and interviews. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2013. My work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Economics and Politics, Latin American Research Review, and Political Analysis.

My first major line of research focuses on the political use of public employment, or patronage. In my book manuscript, Patronage at Work: Public Jobs and Political Services in Argentina (currently under review at Cambridge University Press), I develop and test a theory that explains what public employees do in exchange for their jobs and why they do it. An article based largely on chapter 5 of the book manuscript was published in Comparative Politics in 2016. A related paper published in Comparative Political Studies in 2018 (co-authored with C. Schuster, University College London) focuses on the effects of bureaucratic structures on public employees’ work motivation, corruption, and provision of political services, drawing on evidence from a different empirical case—bureaucrats in the Dominican Republic.

My second major area of research explores the phenomenon of corruption and shows how citizen expectations about the behavior of others can encourage involvement in corruption. This project, in collaboration with A. Corbacho and M. Ruiz Vega (IMF), and D. Gingerich (University of Virginia), has produced three published co-authored articles (American Journal of Political Science 2016, Political Analysis 2016, Economics and Politics 2018) and a research note (under review at the International Journal of Public Opinion Research). In a third ongoing project with M. V. Murillo (Columbia University) and R. Zarazaga (CIAS, Argentina), we use survey experiments to seek to understand how clientelism works to generate credibility for inter-temporal exchanges of goods and favors for electoral support. Relatedly, in a forthcoming chapter, I leverage a combination of different measures of electoral malfeasance, taken twice over the course of the 2015 Argentine campaign, to uncover the relationship between personal experiences with and perceptions of ballot integrity and clientelism.

Besides these three projects, my other scholarship to date has focused on my long-standing interest in electoral behavior. I have published several solo and coauthored book chapters and articles on Argentinean and Latin American elections. In collaboration with N. Lupu (Vanderbilt University), C. Gervasoni (UTDT, Argentina), and L. Schiumerini (University of Notre Dame), we conducted a two-wave panel survey during the 2015 general election campaign in Argentina (available at http://virginiaoliveros.com/data/). A forthcoming edited volume, Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (with N. Lupu and L. Schiumerini, Michigan University Press), examines the determinants of vote choice in developing contexts.