Gisela Zaremberg | Navigating Collapse: Resistance and Innovation in Ultra-Conservative Anti-Rights Contexts

This lecture examines how feminist and pro-rights actors in Latin America are responding to ultra-conservative anti-rights projects amid democratic erosion, deepening inequality, and institutional fragility. Rather than focusing exclusively on resistance, it highlights emerging forms of political innovation. Particular attention is given to experiments that transform political representation by creating new channels for historically excluded voices, strengthening participatory institutions, and reimagining state–society relations. The lecture also explores fiscal activism as a strategic frontier: efforts to expose regressive taxation, redirect public spending, defend social investment, and connect fiscal justice with gender equality, care, democracy, and redistribution.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Gisela Zaremberg is a Professor at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in México since 2003. She specializes in gender, feminism and intersectionality, and in political sociology. She served as Head of the Academic Secretariat in FLACSO México (2012-2014), as Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Sciences Research, the Master Program in Comparative Public Policies, as well as Head of the Research Department. She founded and is the coordinator of the Master in Public Policy and Gender. She is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. Zaremberg is active in regional collaborative networks, such as Red de Politólogas - #NoSinMujeres and Gender, (in) equalities and Rights CLACSO Working Group. Zaremberg has published extensively on gender, feminisms and conservative backlash, as well as democratic innovation and participation in Latin America. Her Book Votes, Women and Social Asistance in peronista Argentina and priista Mexico (1947-1964) won the Donna Lee Van Cott Prize for Best Book on Political Institutions in Latin America, by LAPIS, LASA. In 2024 she won an honorific mention for the best book in Political Science by ABCP for her most recent publication written with Debora Rezende de Almeida titled: Feminismis in Latin America: Pro-choice Nested Networks in Mexico and Brazil (Cambridge University Press).

DISCUSSANTS

María Bacilio, Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American Studies, Princeton University

Felipe Cala Buendía, Acting Lead for Latin America and the Caribbean, Open Society Foundations

MODERATOR

Javier Guerrero, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University