Dr Sian Lazar
Lecturer; Fellow, Clare College
email: sl360 [at] cam.ac.uk
Research interests: Latin America (specifically Argentina and Bolivia); ethnography of the state, democracy and citizenship; social movements; gender; the city; and the anthropology of politics and development.
The focus of my research is collective politics in two quite different contexts: El Alto, an indigenous and mixed-ethnicity city in the Bolivian Andes, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. El Also has become one of the most important centres of political radicalism in Bolivia. In 2003-5, street protests concentrated in El Alto forced two of Bolivia’s presidents to resign, and in December 2005 Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. I researched the processes and conflicts that lie behind this political power at the local level, considering in particular everyday practices and experiences of citizenship that structure the relationships between residents of El Alto and the Bolivian state. This resulted in a book: El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia , published by Duke University Press ; an ethnography of citizenship that combines anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy.
In Buenos Aires, I am working with public sector trade unions. My interest is in the relationship between individual workers, trade unions and the state, examining the implications of that relationship for people’s political subjectivities and agency – their citizenship.
