Our team member Gabriela Tafoya will give a talk at Koç University on October 17, 2019. You can find the details below.

SOCIOLOGY TALKS
Date: October 17 (Wednesday), 12:00-13:30 pm
Location: SOS 143
(Pizza and soft drinks will be served)

Title: Will Brazil succumb to “strong man” politics, again?

Gabriela Ramalho Tafoya, University of Connecticut and Koç University

Abstract: “Strong man” politics and military influence seemed like relics of the past after more than three decades of democracy in Brazil, until last Sunday. Through an overview of recent political history this presentation will put the first-round electoral success of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in context. Brazil’s troubles are not new as the widespread protests of 2013 and recent ouster of President Rousseff show. I will argue that the exhaustion of the PT mandate, multiple corruption scandals, rising violence, widespread popular dissatisfaction, a wavering economy and one impeachment contributed to the polarization that propelled a relatively obscure figure to the forefront of the Presidential election of 2018. The presentation will conclude with some speculation about the possibility of authoritarianism in Brazil.

Bio: Gabriela Ramalho Tafoya is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and Research Fellow in the ERC project “The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an “Emerging Markets” Welfare State Regime” in the Department of Sociology at Koç University. Her research focuses on the politics of social protection in developing countries. Her dissertation examines the development of social welfare regimes across twenty countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an original, regionally comparable measure of welfare generosity that emphasizes the variety of social assistance programs that have proliferated across the Global South in recent years. She received her M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (2011) and her B.A. from SUNY Purchase College (2010).