Julia Paley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Work. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University, and earned her B.A. in Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary research interests are on the multiple meanings and practices of democracy in various geographic contexts. Through fieldwork in Chile, she has explored the ways in which social organizations in a Santiago población (shantytown) created strategies to improve living conditions and analyze political phenomena in the post-dictatorship period. Through ongoing research in Ecuador, funded by the Fulbright Comission and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, she is investigating democracy promotion activities by international agencies in relation to citizen participation processes by alternative local governments. Dr. Paley's book Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) won the 2001 Sharon Stephens award of the American Ethnological Society for the best first book by a junior scholar. Dr. Paley, who has received an award for excellence in teaching urban studies, has interests that include urban neighborhoods, ethnicity, political anthropology, ethnographic methodology and Latin American ethnography.

Selected Publications:

2004. Accountable Democracy: Citizens’ Impact on Public Decision Making in Postdictatorship Chile. American Ethnologist. 31(4): 497-513.

2002. Toward an Anthropology of Democracy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31:469-96.

2001. Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2001. Making Democracy Count: Opinion Polls & Market Surveys in the Chilean Political Transition. Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 135-164.

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