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Over the past fifty years Brazil’s evangelical community has increased from five to twenty-five percent of the population. This volume’s authors use statistical overview, historical narrative, personal anecdote, social-scientific analysis, and theological inquiry to map out this emerging landscape. The book’s thematic center pivots on the question of how Brazilian evangelicals are exerting their presence and effecting change in the public life of the nation. Rather than fixing its focus on the interior life of Brazilian evangelicals and their congregations, the book’s attention is directed toward social expression: the ways in which Brazilian evangelicals are present and active in the common life of the nation.
Democratic institution-building experiences, innovative forms of social organization, and the development of multiple state-society interfaces represent a significant political phenomenon in Latin America in the last half-century. By comparing the two largest countries of the subcontinent, Brazil and Mexico, Democratizing the State examines social accountability and social control regimes. These regimes are conceived configurations of relationships between actors, organizational structures, norms, and resources, all arranged in a stable and institutionalized manner to exert social control over state actors and functions. The book addresses the contrasting characteristics and different functions through which the citizenry and civil society exert control over state action in both countries. Characterizing these experiences broadly as regimes is novel and enlightening regarding the work of practitioners and scholars on political participation, social accountability, and democracy in the global South and the global North.
This book explores the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) in Latin America. It highlights the challenges and possibilities for the countries of this region, and analyzes the evolution of the Social Economy’s processes in order to ascertain its implications and social dimensions. The text also deals with solidarity alternatives in the capital market and the emergencies that occur in order to humanize the capitalist system.
While scholars, activists and pundits from around the world have heralded the Lula years as a breakthrough for poverty reduction and the forthcoming emergence of Brazil as a dynamic economic superpower, many of their counterparts in the country as well as a number of Brazilianists elsewhere, have expressed great disappointment. Tracing back the trajectory of Brazilian Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT), Hernán F. Gómez Bruera explores how holding national executive public office contributed decisively to a pragmatic shift away from the party’s radical redistributive and participatory platform, earning the approbation of international audiences and criticisms of domestic pr...
Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changi...
Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women’s social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women’s innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and ...
This book sheds light on the outcomes of social movements in Brazil. It provides an extensive analysis of how and when collective mobilization and protest activities brought about social and political change. Charting the dynamics and characteristics of Brazil’s social movements from the abolition of slavery in 1888 to the present day, the contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the processes of social movement activism in Brazil, and its relations with political institutions across various types of governments and political regimes. They bring to light both political opportunity structures of different historical periods, and the political and cultural consequences of mobilization ...
Architectures of Hope examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years. Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, Moisés Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community. He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for—and eventually secured—homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida...
This book explores the international diffusion of Participatory Budgeting (PB), a local policy created in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which has now spread worldwide. The book argues that the action of a group of individuals called “Ambassadors of Participation” was crucial to make PB part of the international agenda. This international dimension has been largely overlooked in the vast literature produced on participatory democracy devices. The book combines public policy analysis and the study of international relations, and makes a broad comparative study of PB, including cases from Latin America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The book also presents a new methodology developed to examine PB diffusion, the “transnational political ethnography”, which combines in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis both at the local and transnational level.