Structural Causes
of Brazilian Lynch Mob Violence
Since 1980 there have been over 1100 episodes of lynch mob violence in
Brazil but despite rivaling the rate of lynching in the historic U.S.
South, this behavior has received little coverage by the U.S. media and
has received even less attention by North American Social Scientists.
Using recently acquired data from the “Database on Gross Human
Rights Violations” compiled by University of São Paulo’s
Nucleo do Estudo de Violência (Center for the Study of Violence),
Tim is taking a first look at the results of a large scale quantitative
analysis (n = 1121) of the lynching phenomena in modern Brazil (1980-2002).
Coupling this data with social, economic and political data from the
Brazilian Census, his study tests threat and popular justice explanations
of mob violence in the Brazilian context.
The Latin American Crime Statistics Dataset
Tim is systematically constructing a database of temporal and spatial
occurrences of crime in Latin America using data from National Censuses
and sub-national level annual statistics. From this database, Tim
is testing structural theories of explanations of crime derived by
Latin Americanists and western Criminologists and Sociologists.
Race, Ethnicity and the State
Through a synthesis on the scholarship on racial/ethnic relations and
theorizing on the state, Tim is constructing a theoretical argument
on the relationship between the state and racial/ethnic groups. Using
Micheal Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994) book, Racial Formation
in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s as a starting point,
Tim is advancing the theoretical considerations of the nature of
state action/inaction and NGOs, and individual citizens roles in
racial projects.
Policing and the Postbellum Lynch Mob
Tim is exploring the linkages between policing and lynch mob violence
in Postbellum Georgia. He uses data that he has gathered the Georgia
Archives on Constable Bonds, county records, and reports of police
officer deaths to reconstruct the nature of policing in lynch-prone
and lynch-scarce counties of historic Georgia.
- Race & Ethnicity
- Criminology
- Political Sociology
- Comparative/Historical Sociology
- Quantitative Methodology
SOC 215: Race & Ethnic Relations in the United States
SOC 312: Elements of Sociological Research
SOC 397: Special Topics: Racial and Ethnic Violence
SOC 438: Sociology of Ethnic Relations in a World Perspective
SOC 552: Seminar in Race and Ethnic Relations
SOC 530: Special Topics: Race, Ethnicity, and the State