Latin America and community is focus for La Casita event

La Casita Cultural Center will present “Latin American Understandings of Community,” a roundtable discussion with Paulina Ochoa, a political theorist from Yale University, at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 6, at the center, 109 Otisco St., Syracuse. The event is free and open to the public.

The discussion is one of a series of events related to the center’s current exhibition, The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala by photographer Efren Lopez.

Ochoa specializes in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. Her most recent book, “The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State” (Penn State Press, 2011), examines the question of what constitutes the people in a democratic society and argues that democratic political theory has a potentially fatal weakness at its core unless it can answer this question satisfactorily. The book posits that “the people” should be seen as a series of events, an ongoing process unfolding in time, and offers a new theory of democratic peoplehood and democratic legitimacy.

Ochoa holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to her appointment at Yale, she held a Carey Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame.