Dr. Mario Venegas will present his research, Privatization, Austerity, and Power Outages: A Glimpse into the Networks of Politicians and Private Corporations in Puerto Rico.
This talk explores preliminary research into the circuits of privatization and austerity following Hurricane Maria (2017) that have led to the privatization of the electric grid in Puerto Rico, leaving hundreds of thousands without reliable power. Through participant-observation, news archives, and government data mining, I am building a network dataset that documents how politicians, functionaries, and other bureaucrats in the Puerto Rican government build ties with private companies like LUMA Energy in the form of contracts and campaign contributions. This project is part of a long-term goal of building a statistical dataset that documents the political networks between Anglo-American corporations and Latin American State actors.
Dr. Mario Venegas is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology department. He is a political sociologist and social movements scholar whose budding research focuses on privatization and austerity politics. Through network analysis and qualitative methods, he examines the political networks in Latin America between governments and US corporations in the form of contracts, political contributions, and other forms of cronyism.
The School of Social Sciences Brown Bag Series is always free, open to faculty, staff, students, and the public, and provides a congenial interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of recent research by School of Social Sciences faculty. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022-2023 Brown Bag Series will take place via Zoom.