Bad robot!

6 hours meetings/panels

Well! That was quite a long day, and it's not even over - Cathy's about to arrive from New York. I had five dissertation meetings, one career meeting, went to half a panel, had dinner with my parents, went to two receptions - I'm beat!

I got a lot of interesting feedback and ideas from a mix of Colombianists and Latin Americanists. Some of it was very practical about how to write a dissertation so that it's more easily convertable into a book, some of it was very specific about sources for Colombia or other countries, and a lot of it was about checking, can I tell my story succinctly (check), does it sound plausible to smart, informed people (check), and does it generate questions for further refinement or expansion of the model (check). A few things stand out: part of my story about La Violencia is about why local conflicts did not aggregate up into revolution. One Colombianist reminded me of Colombia's relative lack of nationalist leaders or movements; this is one obvious explanation with which I'll need to contend. A Latin Americanist who worked with historical data suggested a strategy for working with secondary and primary materials that's very congruent with what I'm planning to do for Antioquia. And a former professor and mentor from my undergrad days, with the wisdom of distance, suggested I need to account for Chile from an angle that I hadn't been expecting.

The panel I attended I chose because it actually addressed a question that someone outside our narrow little discipline might ask: what's up with all the leftists winning elections in Latin America? One answer is, well, market reforms in the early '90s had about a decade to try to make concrete improvements in people's everyday lives, and if they didn't do so, we were going to see a resurgence of the populism of Peron and the like from the 40s and 50s. Sure enough, that's what happened. Another way of seeing it is that some countries have more room to maneuver in terms of setting economic policy: like Venezuela, they have a lot of resource dollars (oil revenue), or like Brazil, their economy is just big enough and diverse enough to give them options that allow for more redistributive policies, so the left has more of a chance to actually flourish.

It's been a fun conference. I was so programmed today that I felt like a little robot, going where the buzzer on my phone tells me to go. It only struck me in the evening that this is probably the last APSA I'll attend; who knows, though, it's a big world and it turns in strange ways.

Cathy should be arriving soon, and I look forward to a fun weekend in Chicago with her and my folks!

Thanks very much to Josh Miles for monitoring this past week. Next up for an abbreviated Labor Day week is my beloved wife, Cathy Sumner! I'll be in Montreal for another conference, LASA, the Latin American Studies Association, on Wednesday and Thursday, so it'll be another travel-heavy edition next week. Enjoy the long weekend, and see you on Tuesday!