Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. My research and teaching interests include citizen participation in the policymaking process, social citizenship rights, social policy, urban governance, and institutional change, with a regional focus on Latin America. My book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America (2019, Cambridge University Press) examines the divergent trajectories of nationally mandated participatory institutions in Brazil and Colombia. I recently began work on my three new research projects. The first examines the construction of rights-based systems to prevent and stop the sexual exploitation of children in Latin America. The second explores the relationship between urban security interventions and the rights of marginalized groups, particularly street-affiliated youth and homeless citizens, in Bogotá and São Paulo. The third project is a special issue that I am co-editing with Amy Erica Smith that assesses the origins, strategies, and impacts of the grassroots right in Latin America.
Prior to coming to Colby, I was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. During the 2017-2018 academic year, I was a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare and Berkeley’s Center for Child and Youth Policy. I completed my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s Travers Department of Political Science, an M.P.P. from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College, where I was a first-generation-to-college student.
You can reach me at LRMayka [AT] colby.edu or on twitter: @LindsayMayka.