2003 Events

What Role Can Civil Society in Argentina Play in Resolving the Crisis?

Ariel Armony
Colby College & Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars

On Other Forms of Political Action
Valeria Procupez, Johns Hopkins University

The Meaning and Residue of the Argentine Rebellion of 2001
Peter Ranis, York College & The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Moderator:

Margaret Crahan
Hunter College & The Graduate Center, City University of New York

In the context of the plurality of forms of protest and social mobilization that have proliferated in Argentina in recent times, Valeria Procupez looks at the development of specific joint projects between community organizations and trade unions in Buenos Aires. The guiding query is whether the profound heterogeneity and fragmentation of claims and social actors hinders or lays the ground for the emergence of alternative political actions.

Peter Ranis will explore the causes and outcomes of the Argentine popular rebellion of December 2001. What antecedents sparked the "uprising"? What were the short-term outcomes and what are the possible longer term consequences of these manifestations of popular discontent? What has been the impact on Argentine social structure, political institutions, societal values and cultural norms?

Ariel Armony is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colby College and Fellow of Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies in Washington D.C. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the co-editor of Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Central America (Scholarly Resources, 2000), author of Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977-1984 (Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1997) and Social Capital and Democracy (Stanford University, forthcoming).

Valeria Procupez is a graduate student of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research with squatter grassroots organizations and urban social movements in Buenos Aires focuses on issues of housing, individual and collective property, political identity, memory and subjectivity.

Peter Ranis, is a Professor of Political Science at York College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has studied the values and ideology of Argentine laborers and employees under the Alfonsín and Menem administrations. His findings have been published as Argentine Workers: Peronism and Contemporary Class Consciousness, University of Pittsburgh (1992), and Class, Democracy and Labor in Contemporary Argentina, Transaction (1995). He contributed a chapter entitled "Impact of State
and Capital Policies on Argentine Labor" in José Havet, Identities, State and Markets, (Toronto, 1999). He has recently given papers on the contemporary Argentine crisis at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University and at a conference on the "Study of Working Class Life", SUNY, Stony Brook (2002).

When: Friday, March 7 at 4:30 P.M.
Where: The Skylight Conference Room
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
(Between 34th and 35th St.)

To reserve please send e-mail to bildner@gc.cuny.edu or leave message at (212) 817-2096.