Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell (Universidad Nacional de San Martín), “The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires”
Wednesday, March 11, 2015, 12:15-1:45pm
Buchanan Penthouse
Lunch available at 12pm
RSVP Here
In this talk, Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell will present findings from her pathbreaking book, The Right to the City, which explains the emergence in the 1980s, and collapse in the 1990s, of a wave of grassroots popular organizations in Villa Lugano, a poor neighborhood located in the south of the capital. Ippolito-O’Donnell has conducted extensive and original field work on urban popular social movements in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, since the mid-1980s. Through participant observation she has documented the role of popular contention in the process of democratization, as well as the contribution of urban social movements to the quality of democracy. Using a mix of both qualitative analysis and quantitative data, she traces the factors—economic, politico-institutional, organizational, and subjective—that account for the organizational weakness and concomitant cyclical patterns of collective action by the urban poor. A key finding is that high levels of mistrust or social hostility within urban popular movements has not only hindered their capacity for collective action but have contributed to the “delegative” features of Argentine democracy. Ippolito-O’Donnell’s richly textured work combines analytical narratives, survey research, and discourse analysis to provide an understanding of the dilemmas and opportunities of popular contention in Buenos Aires, and the repertoires of action and association through which the urban popular sectors struggle to expand and consolidate citizenship rights.
Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell is Professor of Politics at the Universidad de San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she previously directed the Center for the Study of Civil Society and Public Life (CESC) and the BA in Political Science. A former Kellogg guest scholar and Mellon project coordinator, she spent calendar year 2013 at the Helen Kellog Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame continuing research on the interconnections between civil society and the quality of democratic institutions in Latin America. Ippolito-O’Donnell’s new book project, “Civil Society and the Quality of Democracy in Argentina,” seeks to explain why an expansive and highly diversified civil society coexists with fragile democratic institutions, uncertain economic development, and stubborn social inequity.
Sponsored by The UBC Department of Political Science’s Distinguished Speaker Series, the UBC Liu Institute for Global Issues, the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, the UBC Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and the UBC Latin American Studies Program, with support from the Faculty of Arts’ HSS Program.