David Smilde

David Smilde recently completed a special issue of Latin American Research Review entitled "Lived Citizenship and Lived Religion in Latin America's Zones of Crisis." His co-editors are Jeff Rubin and Ben Jung, and he brought together a group of articles that look at the way people address contexts of crime, violence and political conflict through religious practices and with the help of religious institutions and professionals.

Smilde is currently developing a neo-Weberian framework for understanding the current political conflict in Venezuela. The goal is to develop a perspective that recognizes the struggle against social, cultural and economic inequalities at the same time that it criticizes the concentration of political power. He will use this framework to rethink a book manuscript he had close to completion when Hugo Chávez passed away in 2013.

With a Venezuelan colleague, Smilde is close to finishing data collection for a project on students and socialism in Venezuela. Hugo Pérez Hernáiz and Smilde seek to understand how "21st Century socialism" appeals to young people in Venezuela, why it makes sense to them and how they think it is different from 20th C socialism. The results should help them understand the growth of illiberal ideologies and movements more broadly.