Advocacy and Activism Faculty

Research Director of Advocacy and Activism

John Burdick has conducted research on social movements, activism, and cultural politics for over twenty-five years. His main areas of investigation are the role of religion in motivating and impeding political activism; the politics of liberation theology and evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; the mobilization and demobilization of Afro-Brazilians around racial politics; and the role of expressive culture, including music, in generating collective action frames. He is currently completing a book entitled The Color of Sound, which analyzes the role of popular music in the development of oppositional politics among evangelicals in São Paulo. More recently, he has developed projects on community organizing in the United States and the rights-based strategy among transnational non-governmental organizations.

SU Faculty Interested in Activism

PARCC seeks to partner with faculty to help them connect to faculty with intersecting research interests, publish working papers on-line, help with small seed grants, organize panels and mini-conferences to assist in the development of projects, and offer assistance in grants-making. Syracuse University has numerous faculty engaged in cutting-edge research on both current and historical advocacy, activism, and social movements.

Matthew Cleary, Associate Professor of Political Science, focuses on the variations in the capacity of Mexican citizens to confront and sway municipal-level governments, and on pro- and anti-autonomy indigenous rights activists.

Cecilia Green, Associate Professor of Sociology, has been involved for over thirty years in various activist projects, including some on far trade, on environmentally-oriented cultural groups in Dominica, on the Bags Across the Globe movement, and the Haiti Solidarity Group. She is currently envisioning a project to link art and environment in Syracuse and the Caribbean, and bringing together "thinkers" and activists working on issues of global trade/globalization.

Louis Kriesberg, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, has been writing on issues of social mobilization for about forty years.

Prema Kurien, Associate Professor of Sociology, is currently engaged in research on the role of religion in social activism, as well as on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S.

Alison Mountz, Associate Professor of Geography, is currently looking at how states are 'offshoring' asylum, hiding people who are trying to reach their shores from view in detention centers in remote locations such as islands. The work has an important advocacy component which involves collaboration with organizations advocating for and visiting people in detention. Locally, that includes the Task Force on Detention, and nationally, the Detention Watch Network, and international coalitions on detention as well.

Steve Parks, Associate Professor in Writing, for the past ten years has sought to link literacy education with collective community politics, creating a process where writing groups act as a lever to articulate political marginalization and gain greater power. Once a collective identity and agenda is created, he publishes the work through the New City Community Press, and develops educational materials for use by public school teachers, community educators, and neighborhood leaders.

Tom Perreault, Associate Professor of Geography, looks at issues of  environmental conflict and indigenous/campesino social mobilization in  the Andes.  He is beginning a new project on mine-related water pollution on  the Altiplano in Bolivia, and its social impacts for indigenous and campesino communities downstream from mining areas.  One big part of  this will be looking at the organizing strategies of a recently formed  grassroots network composed of over 80 communities affected by mining.  In addition he has been looking at the irrigators' movement in Bolivia, as well as the contentious politics surrounding natural gas  development.

Gretchen Purser, Assistant Professor of Sociology, leads PARCC's Labor Studies Working Group and organizes the Labor Studies Symposium series. She specializes in work and labor, with a focus on urban poverty, punishment, ethnography, and social theory.

Herbert Ruffin, Assistant Professor of African American Studies is a historian of Black suburbanization, Black political thought and community development in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

Hans-Peter Schmitz, Associate Professor of Political Science, focuses on the institutionalized side of activism, and how those NGOs deal with challenges of leadership, accountability, transparency.  Through the TNGO initiative, he researches rights-based approaches and the expanding rights of indigenous communities.

Jamie Winders, Associate Professor of Geography, is working on a book on Latino migration, racial politics, and community change in Nashville, Tennessee, in which she has worked with advocacy groups operating at different scales. She also examines the factors driving changing social and political responses to immigrants in smaller southern towns. There, conflict and advocacy around immigration are key parts of the research.