Professors Sonia Alvarez, Barbara Cruikshank and Charles Hale (University of Texas at Austin) have received a Mellon Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Seminars Initiative Award to support their continued research aimed at theorizing protest movements.

The recent street protests in places like India, Turkey, and Egypt are generating sharp challenges to existing scholarship on protest, and protests in the Latin American region— dating back to at least 1989—offer a provocative set of experiences for theorizing protest, they say.

“The mass protests and uprisings that have captured the popular imagination and commandeered unprecedented media attention since 2011 continue to introduce new actors to political life, new tactics and counter-tactics to protest, and new challenges for research on protest,” says Cruikshank. 

Indeed, these recent protest movements offer a unique opportunity for the researchers to compare and contrast protest internationally and to question, expand or extend existing theory.

Professors Alvarez and Cruikshank are founding members of the UMass-based Tahrir Moments Research Group.  The LASA grant will allow for the expansion of his interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and collaborative research initiative and fund a seminar and panel presentations at the LASA 2014 conference and allow for the creation of an international conference on protest in 2015.