Jeffrey W. Rubin

Jeffrey W. Rubin is Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston University and at BU's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. He does research on social movements in Latin America, going to places where ordinary people organize to transform the world around them. Jeff lived in the southern Mexican city of Juchitán for a year and wrote Decentering the Regime, about a radical Zapotec Indian movement that won elections and governed the city. After that, he spent a year with his family in the southern Brazilian state if Rio Grande do Sul, studying an urban participatory budgeting project in the capital city of Porto Alegre and the rural women's movement in the countryside.

Jeff brought his daughter Emma with him to the statewide assembly of the women's movement and then took his whole family to the small town of Ibiraiaras to attend a workshop on women's rights in a church basement. The bond forged between Emma and the women in Ibiraiaras led to years of research and collaboration between father, daughter, and the leaders of the women's movement, leading first to a secondary school curriculum on Brazilian social movements and then to Sustaining Activism. Written in two voices in alternative chapters, the book tells the story of women fighting for change in rural Brazil and of the innovative research methodology that Jeff and Emma developed together (sustainingactivism.com).