Teaching activities

As Assistant Professor, I taught during two semesters an undergraduate course of Social Research at the University of Pittsburgh, which included a field trip to Ecuador to apply research methods. During Spring 2009, I offered a graduate course on Latin American politics at the University of Kassel. More recently, before starting my doctoral program at the FU, I was teaching one of the sections of Political Sociology at the (UCAB), in Caracas.

Forschung Promotionsprojekt / Research Project:

"Wome’s inclusion and participation under the Venezuelan “transformative” State: between fragmentation and depolitization?"

My current research doctoral project is framed within the Venezuelan political process since 1999, the so called “revolutionary process”. Basically I am looking at the different State “transformations" and its implications for women’s political participation/organisation at a grassroots and communal level. More specifically, since 2007, the government took a step forward the transformation of the State apparatus, aiming at a new political reconfiguration of State and society. It included territorial, financial, political, and even local identity aspects. New political divisions and self-managed local organisations, with certain degree of autonomy and direct exercise of power, were promoted and created strongly from a top-down direction. Significant mobilisations at the local and regional levels, however, took place not only through electoral processes, but also with the implementation of different social policies and programs as a mechanism of redistribution of resources, power, and access to different levels of the State. These polices involved significantly (quantitatively and qualitatively) the mobilisation of different women and women’s groups, mostly those characterised as the most vulnerable, excluded, and the poorest. This research project aims at analysing and determining the implications for women’s inclusion and participation in regard to some of these state transformations during this period.

Vorträge / Presentations:

I have presented different papers in international conferences and symposiums, among them: International Conference on Trans-Regional Feminism at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt (2009), Brown International Research Institutes: BIARI in Providence (2010), IPSA in Sao Paolo (2011), Norwergian Latin American Research Network: NOLAN in Oslo (2013), LASA in Chicago (2014).