Dr. Carter M. Koppelman

Background

Carter M. Koppelman received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley, and joined the Sociology faculty at Florida Atlantic University in 2019. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Centers for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and Peace, Justice, and Human Rights (PJHR), was the 2022 faculty fellow of the Study of the Americas Initiative, and has contributed to the development of a new, interdisciplinary Global Studies program at FAU. 

As a scholar, Dr. Koppelman is broadly interested in how individuals and movements pursue dignity in unequal societies, and how opportunities to do so are structured by political and economic forces. Focusing on the working-class peripheries of Latin American cities, he primarily uses political ethnography to study the impact of social policies on people’s everyday lives, sense of citizenship, and engagements with state agencies. His current book project, tentatively titled Contesting Homeowner Citizenship, uses comparative ethnography to examine how market-oriented housing policies shaped precariously housed women’s struggles for urban inclusion in Santiago, Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows how similar housing policies produce different state-citizen relations, living conditions, and gendered meanings of housing rights, as they are contested by popular movements in different urban political contexts.

Dr. Koppelman has published research in Qualitative Sociology, Social Politics, Latin American Perspectives, and City & Community. In addition to his book manuscript, he is currently revising a handbook chapter on São Paulo’s contributions to global urban sociology, organizing a special issue for the International Journal of Comparative Sociology on Global Ethnographic Comparison, and developing a new research project on the meanings and management of household debt in urban Brazil. 

In the classroom, Dr. Koppelman is dedicated to helping his students make sense of the historical and structural forces that affect their lives and communities, and engaging them in critical dialogue on global and local social issues. He teaches Sociology courses on social theory, development & globalization, social change, and various aspects of cities and urban life. He has also collaborated with faculty across the College of Arts & Letters to offer interdisciplinary Global Studies courses on migration, citizenship, race, and urbanism. 

 

Recent Publications

Koppelman, Carter. 2022. “Empowered Homeowners, Responsible Mothers: Promises and Pitfalls of Maternalist Housing Provision in Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida Program.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. Online first. 

Koppelman, Carter. 2021. “Inclusion in Indignity: Seeing the State and Becoming Citizens in Chile’s Social Housing.” Qualitative Sociology 44(3): 385-402.

Koppelman, Carter. 2018. “‘For Now, We Are in Waiting’: Negotiating Time in Chile’s Social Housing System.” City & Community 17(2): 46-63.

Koppelman, Carter. 2017. “Deepening Demobilization: The State’s Transformation of Civil Society in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile.” Latin American Perspectives 44(3): 46-63.