UF Center for Latin American Studies
Note: Dr. Hanson is on leave for the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters.
Crime and Citizen Security; Political Sociology; Urban Sociology; Policing; Social Movements and Citizen Participation; Gender; Latin America; Qualitative Methods
Venezuela and Colombia
Rebecca Hanson holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on how policies and political changes that seek to reduce inequality and violence end up contributing to these problems and how changing modalities of violence in the 21st century affect state building and capacity, with a specific focus on policing. She is also passionate about qualitative inquiry and ethnography, with a focus on how power dynamics within academia contribute to experiences with violence as researchers conduct fieldwork.
Dr. Hanson’s first book, Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research, was co-authored with Patricia Richards and published with University of California Press in 2019. Harassed examines the androcentric, racist, and colonial epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology that continue to contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment and other forms of violence researchers encounter in the field. Along with David Smilde and Verónica Zubillaga, she is the co-editor of The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing During Chavismo (2022, University of Pittsburgh Press. Using empirical case studies, the editors analyze why violence increased in the country at the same time that poverty and inequality decreased under Chavismo. The chapters in this volume seek to reorient thinking about the relationship between crime, violence, poverty, and inequality, arguing that particular models of governance and citizen security policies affect how this relationship plays out.
Her current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, uses ethnographic, interview, and survey research from Venezuela collected over eight years to examine how a left wing political project altered how policing is done, who is charged with policing, and the lives of policed populations in the country.
Dr. Hanson’s research also looks at how policing has changed throughout the region and the Global South more broadly. Through the Metaketa Initiative IV she worked with researchers across six different countries in the Global South to answer the question: Can community policing be used effectively by police forces in contexts in which the legitimacy of the state is challenged? She is currently collaborating with colleagues on multiple projects. One of these, Post-Conflict Security Structures and Citizen Buy-In, uses comparative ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and yearly data collected on security groups across nine countries in Latin America to understand how legacies of civil war and more recent experiences with gang violence shape state legitimacy and how policing is done. In Venezuela she is collaborating with colleagues to look at challenges to transitional justice and peace processes in a context where multiple and competing armed actors exist and to document how different armed groups in the country and their relationships to the state have evolved over time.
For more information about Dr. Hanson's research, teaching, and publications check out her personal website: https://www.rebeccahansonsoc.com/
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