Wednesday, February 5 2020, 12pm Park Hall, Room 145 This talk is presented by the LACSI Brown Bag Series. For more information on upcoming talks download the event schedule here. As calls for accountability and open governance become ubiquitous, state actors are increasingly tasked with making policy data and knowledge of state affairs public. In this talk, Dr. Graizbord examines how Mexican state experts make policy performance data public through various ‘acts of generosity’. She suggests that by packaging and promoting state-generated data in ways that appeal to various publics and by training journalists and civil society organizations to use and interpret this data, experts can overcome deeply rooted mistrust of the state and successfully perform transparency. At the same time, these 'acts of generosity’ can limit the power of ordinary Mexican citizens to hold public officials accountable. Dr. Graizbord draws on ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and media analysis conducted between 2013-2016. About The Speaker Diana Graizbord received her PhD in Sociology from Brown University where she was an NSF-IGERT Fellow in Development and Inequality in the Global South. Her research examines knowledge in politics, democracy and development, and social policy. Diana is currently working on her first book, Indications of Democracy: Evaluation Expertise and the Politics of Accountability, which examines the role of monitoring and evaluation expertise in the production of democratic accountability in contemporary Mexico. Download the event flier here.
