Professional Affiliation

Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at New Paltz

Expert Bio

Benjamin Junge is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018) and co-editor of Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship and the in-press Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil. His research focuses on class mobility, political attitudes, gender, sexuality, health, and religion. He recently co-directed a three-year investigation of political subjectivities among the demographic sector once known as Brazil’s “new middle class,” focusing on perceptions of the 2013-18 crisis, cultural memory of authoritarian pasts, and the rise of popular conservativism.

Wilson Center Project

Precarious Mobilities: Brazil’s ‘New Middle Class’ in Times of Growth and Crisis

Project Summary

Dr. Junge’s research and fellowship writing projects center on the complex political subjectivities of Brazil’s “previously poor”—the estimated 35 million people who rose above the poverty line during a recent period of economic growth (2003-2011) and came to be contentiously referred to as the “new middle class.” Junge’s empirical investigation of this group (funded under a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation) was undertaken during the economic downturn and conservative political shift that began around 2013 and which has spawned unprecedented cynicism around politics and democracy. In examining political subjectivities, Junge considers how “new middle class” Brazilians understand themselves as citizens, their expectations of the state, and their interest in civic action. A cultural anthropologist, Junge examines political subjectivity ethnographically from the vantage point of everyday-life experience, where it inevitably intersects with other dimensions of identity, behavior, and community, including along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.

Major Publications

Junge, Benjamin. Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism, and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil. University of New Mexico Press, 2018.

Junge, Benjamin. “‘The Energy of Others’: Narratives of Envy and Purification among Former Grassroots Community Leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 49, no. S, 2014, pp. 81–98.

Junge, Benjamin. “NGOs as Shadow Pseudo-Publics: Grassroots Community Leaders’ Perceptions of Change and Continuity in Porto Alegre, Brazil.” American Ethnologist, vol. 39, no. 2, May 2012, pp. 407–24.