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Participants Faculty
Arturo Escobar (Department of Anthropology) Graduate Students
Maya Parson (Department of Anthropology) Affiliated Members
Steven Sherman (Sociologist, Independent researcher and Activist, Chapel Hill) Coordinators Arturo Escobar is currently Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies. His book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History 1994) focused on how the industrialized nations of North America and Europe came to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and how the postwar discourse on development actually created the so-called Third World. Since the late 1980s, he has been part of a research group on Latin American social movements which has resulted in two well-known anthologies on the subject, The Making of Social Movements in Latin America (1992), co-edited with Sonia Alvarez, and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Culture: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (1998), co-edited with S. Alvarez and Evelina Dagnino. He is a founding member of the Project for a World Anthropology/ies Network, a network of scholars and activists that questions current patterns of knowledge production, opening up anthropology to a plurality of styles, modes of thinking, practices, and inquiries about culture world wide. He is also co-directing with Wendy Harcourt, of the Society for International Development in Rome, an international project on "Women and the Politics of Place." This project brings together intellectual-activists and activists-intellectuals working with place-based movements in various parts of the world, particularly involving women. More recently, he co-edited the book World Social Forum: Challenging Empires (2004), focused on this important site of alternative models of public life. At UNC-CH, he is co-organizer of the "Globalization, Modernity/Coloniality, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge" Working Group (one of the working groups within the UNC-Duke Latin American Studies Consortium), and of the Social Movements Working Group. Dorothy Holland (Ph.D. University of California-Irvine, 1974) is Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Anthropology and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology. She is also current President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, a national organization. Holland's current research interests concern identity, local democracy, activism and the environmental movement, and she has given numerous invited talks and written papers on these topics. She values collaborative, multi-sited research projects, and has worked on several collaborative projects with colleagues investigating the new conditions for political and cultural activism and the importance of environmental issues in the public sphere, including a forthcoming book, If This is Democracy: Public Interests and Private Politics in a Neoliberal Age (New York University Press) based on a multi-sited examination of local democracy in North Carolina. In 2000, Holland co-organized a conference on environmental justice that brought together activists and academics. In 2001, she and colleagues organized "Local Democracy? An Uncertain Future?" a public workshop/conference that brought together academics, activists and members of the public, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Other recent work has examined how social movements inhabit people's lives, becoming not only viable communities of practice but enduring cultural forms. Charles Kurzman (Ph.D, University of California - Berkeley, 1992) is Associate Professor of Sociology. He is also Associate Director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at UNC-CH, and Co-Director of the Carolina Seminar on Comparative Islamic Studies. His research interests include: political sociology, social movements, international development, social theory; the social bases of democracy; liberal Islamic movements; the Iranian Revolution of 1979; civil society and its discontents. This Fall, he is teaching a graduate course on "Radical Islamic Movements" as well as one on "Social Theory". Kurzman is also the editor of Liberal Islam: A Source-Book (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Source-Book (Oxford University Press, 2002), two books that present numerous voices from the modernist and liberal Islamic traditions which challenge the prevailing clash of civilizations conception between Islam and the West. His latest book The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2004) explores the uncertainty, the rumors, and the danger that Iranians felt in 1977-1979, focusing on the inherently unpredictable nature of revolutions and other social movements thereby contributing to an understanding of what takes place in such periods of intense upheaval and social change. He also co-edited (with Michaelle Browers) An Islamic Reformation? (Lexington Books, 2004). Currently, Kurzman is working on a new book Democracy Denied, 1905-1915: Intellectuals and Constitutionalism in the Developing World that provides a comparative-historical analysis of several short-lived democratic experiments that took place in the early 20th century in Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico and China. In addition, he has published numerous papers on the issues of Islamic political movements and social movement theory. |