Areas of Interest: Democracy, urban governance, racism, social movements, civil society, and Brazil.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi is associate professor (research) of international studies at the Institute and associate professor at the Department of Sociology. He is also director of the Development Studies Program.
He is an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He researches actually existing civil societies and participatory democracy, with a special interest in Brazil. He also writes on critical social theory, especially within the "relational" tradition, and on race relations. He is engaged in several collaborative projects, including the engaged work of promoting participatory democracy in the US. They include:
• The Changing Nature of Public Space
• Interrogating Civil Society: An Inter-American Consortium
• The Participatory Budgeting Project
• Beyond Good Governance
• The Paradoxes of Participation: Social Movements and Political Institutions in recent Brazil
• The Right to the City – Associational Activity and Urban Space in São Paulo
Baiocchi's monograph, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (2005: Stanford University Press) was an ethnography of popular participation in this Brazilian city, and a forthcoming book, Making Spaces for Civil Society (co-authored with Institute Faculty Fellow Patrick Heller and Marcelo K. Silva) examines participatory arrangements in several pairs of cities in Brazil. His most recent research has been about the travel and translation of participatory blueprints and ideas in the current era.
Prior to joining Brown, Baiocchi was associate professor of sociology and associate director for research and core faculty at the Center for Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also editor of States and Societies: The Newsletter of the Political Sociology Section of the ASA and associate editor of Social Science History. He received his PhD and MS in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
Read his full biographical statement here.