Wednesday, April 2, 2025
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Kim Koo Library (328), 111 Thayer St.
About the Event
Carla Yumatle presents a new definition of populism based on the “creation of a new social actor,” as its necessary condition. This approach to populism has two implications. First, it shows that today’s democratic discontent could not be properly understood through the lenses of populism. Second, it suggests that populism, thus defined, was possible under certain structural historical social conditions that today have been eroded.
About the Speaker:
Carla Yumatle is currently the R.F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard University, and was the Fortabat Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University in the Fall 2024. She teaches political theory at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina). She earned her PhD in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley, a Masters from London School of Economics, and her postdoctoral research at Brown University in the Political Theory Project. She published on liberalism, pluralism and human rights. She co-edited El mundo visto desde América Latina (2024) and La sociedad civil en América Latina: transformaciones y rupturas recientes (forthcoming, October 2025). She is currently working on various projects such as the erosion of democracy; populism; an analysis of the ideal of democracy in the first transitional government in Argentina; and the new conceptions of human rights held by different actors in civil society in Latin America.