I am an associate professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at the University at Albany. I received my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2015. Using ethnography and comparative historical methods I study the forces that enable and constrain the deepening and extension of democracy. This has led me to research left and right parties, social and labor movements, climate change, and national and urban politics in Latin America and the US. My award-winning work is published in leading university presses and social science journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Theory and Society, Social Text, Journal of World-Systems Research and Latin American Perspectives. I have authored dozens of public-facing pieces in outlets such as the Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Independent, The Nation, In These Times, NACLA, Jacobin and elsewhere. I have also appeared regularly in the media to discuss Venezuelan and Bolivian politics, with appearances on Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, NPR, BBC Radio, Fox News, Radio Canada, and elsewhere.

My first book, Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn (Columbia University Press), examines a classic question: what are the limits of democracy, and under what conditions can they be expanded? The book challenges the widely held view that democracy is possible only when it is “safe” for elites. The history of the Right in Latin America and elsewhere seems to show this. The Latin American Right has repeatedly deposed elected left governments that threatened elites, and only accepted democracy in the 1980s and 90s when it became safe due to the Left’s defanging and the spread of pro-elite market reforms. The region’s “left turn” raised the question anew: would the Right accept democracy if it became unsafe for elites? Democracy on the Ground examines this question where it was posed most starkly, in Venezuela and Bolivia, widely considered the two most radical left turn cases. Using 22 months ethnographic fieldwork I compare participatory reform in a left- and right-governed city in each country at the left turn’s height. In my fieldwork I observed 150 local government, civic association, and political party meetings, assemblies, workshops, protests, and more, and interviewed 200-plus elected officials, bureaucrats, party and civic association leaders and members, and citizens. I began my research expecting to find more success in the left-governed cities and in Bolivia rather than Venezuela due to Bolivia’s “movement-left” and Venezuela’s “left-populist” ruling parties, with scholars viewing the former as more conducive to deepening democracy. Unexpectedly I found success in the left- and right-run Venezuelan cases and failure in both Bolivian cities. The book shows that the key to explaining these doubly puzzling findings is that Venezuela’s ruling party became hegemonic, in the sense of successfully presenting its ideas as the ideas of all, while Bolivia’s ruling party did not. This meant the Right in Venezuela but not Bolivia had to ‘play the game’ of politics on the Left’s terrain. Democracy on the Ground contributes to literatures on democracy, participatory governance, and civic engagement. Its key contribution is to show that just as rightwing hegemony can reshape the Left (e.g. Margaret Thatcher calling Tony Blair her “greatest accomplishment”), leftist hegemony can reshape the Right, forcing it to embrace leftist ideas and accept democracy even when it is “unsafe.” In other work I examine the evolution of the party system in contemporary Venezuela, and look at the promises, pitfalls and challenges facing Chavismo.

I am working on two book projects. The first, Paths to Decarbonization, is a cross-national comparative study of efforts to link decarbonization to social justice and democratic deepening in Colombia, Spain, and New York State (focused on the Build Public Renewables Act). The project seeks to understand the forces that enable and constrain what I term “democratizing decarbonization” in which decarbonization goes hand in hand with efforts to build more extensive and deeper forms of democracy. The second, The Specter of Venezuela, examines Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution with two aims: first, to capture and explain the promise and pitfalls of the Bolivarian process, and second, to examine and explain the ways in which the specter of Venezuela has been mobilized by centrist and rightwing forces throughout the Americas to inhibit progressive change.

I have also conducted research on the revitalization of the American labor movement. In 2015  I published an article looking at a rare case of a successful union-worker center alliance in New York City in Work, Employment and Society. An earlier version of this article won the 2009 best graduate student paper award, honorable mention, from the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements section.

I have taught courses on classical and contemporary social theory, international development, introduction to sociology, urban studies, democracy, political economy,  contemporary Latin American politics, and climate change.

In addition to academic research, teaching and writing, I seek to engage with the broader public in a number of ways. These include serving on the advisory board of the Participatory Budgeting Project and the North American Participatory Budgeting Research Board. I have also worked as a research consultant, advisor and process facilitator with participatory budgeting processes (and community activists seeking to initiate such processes) in Vallejo and Oakland, California. In 2015 I was invited to monitor Venezuela’s parliamentary election and traveled there as part of the National Electoral Council’s International Electoral Accompaniment process. From 2013-2016  I served as a member of the American Sociological Association Task Force on Engaging Sociology, helping the discipline to think about how to evaluate (for purposes of hiring and promotion) publicly oriented communication and write a report on this.

My research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Labor and Employment, the University of California, Berkeley and the University at Albany, SUNY. I have received awards for my research, teaching and public engagement work from the ASA Sociology of Development Section, Labor and Labor Movement Section, the Latin American Studies Association Venezuelan Studies Section, UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley Sociology department.

To contact me please email ghetland AT albany.edu.