Profile

Paulo Ravecca

Faculty of Arts
Department of Political Science

Assistant Professor
Office: MN 404
Phone: 902-491-3349
Email: paulo.ravecca@smu.ca

Paulo Ravecca holds a PhD in Political Science from York University. Prior to coming to Saint Mary’s University in 2023, he taught for several years at Universidad de la República, the premier university in Uruguay. His research program mobilizes Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and post- and decolonial theory to make sense of contemporary issues and challenges in the political world. Ravecca is particularly intrigued by the place that knowledge, thought, subjectivity, and narrative occupy in power dynamics and democracy. His work is methodologically eclectic as it borrows tools from comparative politics, political theory, International Relations, political economy, and cultural studies.

 

Ravecca is the author of The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences (Routledge 2019) which applies critical theories and critical self-reflection to the discipline of political science itself, showing how knowledge is an integral component of power formations. His challenge to conventional wisdom and to the idea that there is a virtuous and linear linkage between political science and liberal democracy has been highly influential in the debate about Latin American political science’s history and development. Other themes of Ravecca’s research are narrative writing and the possibilities for scholarship, the politics of innocence in the context of neoliberalism, far-right politics and social movements, memory practices and human rights, and the challenges of being a Latin American theorist in the global north.

 

Ravecca is the current editor of Journal of Narrative Politics whose mandate is to explore narrative methods in research, writing, and pedagogy. He enjoys co-authorship and intellectual collaboration and is active in collective spaces and international academic institutions. He has served as Chair of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee 33 whose task is to critically reflect on political science in a global context, as well as of the Section Culture, Power and Politics of the Latin American Studies Association. In 2023 he was one of the organizers of the World Congress of Political Science’s special session Memory Activisms: an Opportunity to Re-envision Political Science and Politics. As an educator he has extensive experience working with students in different regional and national institutions in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States among others. The classroom is Paulo’s favorite corner of academia. In a world increasingly engulfed by neoliberalism and its metrics of success and survival, and where our individual and collective capacities for thought and action are systematically assaulted by powerful forces, the encounter that happens in the classroom is, he believes, an imperfect yet precious refuge for hope and political imagination.

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