Curriculum Vitae

Teaching

Jocelyn Viterna

Assistant Professor of Sociology and of Social Studies

Biographical Note

Jocelyn Viterna is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies. Her areas of interest include social movements, civil society, democratization, revolution, comparative politics, and gender.

Viterna received a B.A. in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Kansas State University (1995), and an M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2003) in Sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington. She taught at Tulane University in New Orleans from 2003-2006, and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2006-2007. Viterna’s research explores the evolving relationship between the state and civil society in countries undergoing transitions to democracy. Her region of emphasis is Latin America, and her three current projects investigate (1) the gendered causes and consequences of guerrilla participation in El Salvador in the 1980s, (2) variations in states’ genders with democratic transitions in Latin America and Africa, and (3) the role of NGOs in both hampering and enhancing grassroots political participation in new democracies. In each project, Viterna begins with the premise that gender is a central locus for contesting and defining new freedoms during periods of state transition. Her research explores how the strategic and gendered actions taken by men, women, and organizations during these moments of state transition may affect the formation of new state structures, and in turn create new gendered identities, interests and opportunities for citizens.

In the first project, a book manuscript entitled When Women Wage War: Explaining the Personal and Political Consequences of Guerrilla Activism in El Salvador, Viterna uses data from 140 in-depth interviews with men and women guerrillas, guerrilla supporters, and non-participants in rural El Salvador to identify the ways that gender structured guerrilla mobilization and participation. She then analyzes the gendered consequences of that participation for individuals and communities, and whether and how patterns of micro-level political participation in turn can create cohort effects that shift gender relations in the broader society. An article from this project, "Pulled, Pushed and Persuaded: Explaining Women's Mobilization into the Salvadoran Guerrilla Army" was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2006.

In the second project, Viterna (with Kathleen Fallon) asks, what happens to a state’s gender during the institutional upheaval of a democratic transition? And how are gender systems implicated in expanding or limiting the realm of possible outcomes for new state institutions? Using comparative historical analysis, Viterna and Fallon challenge the notion that democratization does little for women in developing nations, and create a conceptual framework for future systematic comparison of newly democratized states. An article from this project, "Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison," is forthcoming in the American Sociological Review.

Viterna’s third project, now in its conceptual stages, analyzes how civil society organizations, and specifically non-governmental organizations, hamper as well as enhance democratic quality and social movement activism in developing nations. She argues that, although NGOs provide needed resources to activists, they may also divide formerly unified groups that are now forced to compete for increasingly scarce resources. Moreover, by providing services that are normally under the state’s purview, NGOs may cost the state its legitimacy, discouraging citizens from participating in political activities.

09/05/2008

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