Sociology Professor and Chair David Smilde weighs in on the Future of Energy Forum, research, media, and how lived experience enhances classroom teaching.
1. You recently participated in Tulane’s Future of Energy Forum in a session focused on Venezuela’s oil industry. From a sociologist’s perspective, what does Venezuela’s energy story reveal about the ways natural resources shape — and are shaped by — society and politics?
Oil-producing nations, where the state controls this extraordinary valuable resource, tend to have complex relationships with democracy, and this is true with Venezuela. On the one hand, it was the extraordinary profits provided by oil sales that allowed a relatively poor country to become one of the wealthiest in Latin America in the 20th Century, with tremendous gains in health, human development and infrastructure. This was an important support for their democratic construction after 1958.
On the other hand, the resources provided by oil production tend to strengthen the executive branch of government and that can often overwhelm democratic constraints on its power. Controlling these resources that essentially feed the economy gives the president extraordinary power to pick winners and losers and generally get people to do what he or she wants. That is exactly what happened with Hugo Chávez and Venezuela is still dealing with the legacy of his weakening of democratic institutions.
Having this valuable commodity under the ground also makes a country like Venezuela much more interesting and strategic for other countries, for better and for worse. If it was not for oil, it is unlikely that the Trump administration would have intervened militarily to oust dictator Nicolás Maduro. But it is also this commodity that seems to be leading the Trump administration to slow-walk Venezuela’s return to democracy.
2. As a professor and chair of Tulane’s Sociology Department, how does your work with students and colleagues influence the questions you bring to your research?
The course I most teach at Tulane is social theory. While it is relatively abstract, my way of teaching it is by engaging actual social phenomena. I bring my research and lived experience into class continually and students’ reactions and questions keep me grounded. They prevent me from just speaking to the 50 or so other people in the world that do research similar to mine.
As well, since I focus on Venezuela but work on a lot of different issues, I have the opportunity to engage many of my Sociology colleagues on issues of their expertise: crime and violence, social movements and protest, law and politics, migration and more. Any number of times I have discussed my research and had a colleague answer with a patient but sympathetic smile, “You know there’s an entire literature on this…”
3. You’ve spent more than 30 years researching Venezuela. What first drew you to the country, and what has kept you engaged?
My story is actually not atypical for a graduate student from my generation. The early 1990s were a quite different era than the one we are living in today. Globalization was the key word and it was seen as an unmitigated good. There was complete confidence that international engagement was a good thing and there was a big push for graduate students to do research abroad. I was able to get support from the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright for my work. I originally chose Venezuela and Colombia as comparative cases for my research on religious change and went down to do research in 1992. That was sort of the peak of the Colombian drug wars and it proved too difficult to do fieldwork there, so I ended up focusing on Venezuela.
During my research — and here is the part that is quite common among graduate students doing fieldwork abroad — I fell in love and married my wife! That meant I then had organic ties to Venezuela and it became more than just a research site. Furthermore, when I got my Fulbright-Hayes dissertation fellowship, it coincided with Venezuela’s economic adjustment package and a currency devaluation that made the value of my research grant soar. What was supposed to be enough for one year lasted three, and the research trip itself lasted for five years. During that time, my wife and I had two daughters and my engagement in Venezuela not only involved my wife’s extended family but the world of pediatricians, daycare, school and soccer parents.
Since 2016, I have been at Tulane full time, but go to Venezuela whenever I am not teaching.
4. As a sociologist, how has studying Venezuela over such a long period shaped the way you understand the relationship between politics, institutions and everyday life?
I was trained as an ethnographer, which is a type of social science based on observation of social interaction in context as opposed, for example, to analyzing survey data. This requires being involved in everyday life. I really had no idea just how intimately involved I would become in my research context, but it has absolutely impacted my scholarship and advocacy. One of the things I most commonly do is put whatever major event happens in Venezuela — from mass protest to a stolen election — into local and historical context. It takes actual lived experience to do this. My current work is more historical than ethnographic, but I still focus on putting events in temporal and spatial context to facilitate understanding for non-Venezuelans. I think of myself as a translator of Venezuela’s political conflict for international audiences.
5. How do you bring a range of perspectives into your teaching, and what do you hope students take away from engaging with your work?
The course of events in my research and advocacy on Venezuela have brought me to engage a broad range of issues — everything from civil society participation, to violence, to peace negotiations, to international relations. At one point I worried I was stretching myself too thin. But I came to realize that being able to synthesize multiple literatures and use them to engage a case you know well is itself a way of doing social science. Our whole scholarly world is oriented towards analytic specialization. I have tried to legitimize synthetic, cross-disciplinary thinking among my students, but with a light touch. To be a good synthetic, broad thinker you need to first be able to master a specialty. So, part of this is a career stage phenomena and students need to master specific issues and methods in their discipline, while still trying to maintain a broad curiosity about and engagement in the world. We need lumpers as well as splitters.
6. You regularly help journalists and public audiences make sense of complicated and rapidly changing events in Venezuela. When people are reading about Venezuela — or another fast-moving international story — what questions should they be asking to better understand the people, institutions and social forces behind the headlines?
At my core, I am an ethnographer and cultural sociologist, which means I focus on the meanings that are put into play when people do what they do in specific contexts. What do they think they are doing? How does that fit into larger narratives or understandings of their role in a broader project or collective? Who are they responding to and what is the history of that relationship? If you can answer those questions, you can come up with a much better understanding of why things play out the way they do than just assuming rational self-interest. In general, the media assumes quite cynical motives of power and material gain, and these are, without a doubt, a logical place to start. But understanding the larger drama that people think they are a part of, and local history they are responding to, can go a long way towards explaining complex and confusing situations. And this can only come from detailed knowledge of the context.
7. How do you think scholars and students can make their research more relevant and accessible for journalists and public audiences?
It is not easy or straightforward. One of the great strengths of higher education in the U.S. is its professionalization and the autonomy that disciplines are given in their universities and the academy more broadly. That means that disciplines develop internal debates that frame the problems that are researched and the concepts and methodologies that are used. This is great for the advancement of disciplinary knowledge, but can also leave it in silos entirely insulated from the struggles and battles of the everyday world we all live in. It takes effort to figure out how to break out of this isolation and create disciplinary knowledge that is relevant to the complex, fast-moving world out there.
Some scholars carry out their research and professional publications and then work to publish them in a more accessible form for a broader audience, without neologisms and technical language. That is a valid and effective route. In my case, given that Venezuela’s political crisis sort of barged into my life, I found myself thrust into the position of bearing witness about what I was seeing. Thus, I have generally engaged the media first — doing interviews and writing opinion articles — and then, when I have commented about an issue long enough, I deepen my engagement with the scholarly literature, thicken my analysis and work on academic publications for my disciplinary colleagues. I definitely think the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake is a cornerstone of scholarly life. But when we see opportunities in which our disciplinary knowledge can make a difference in this complex, troubled world we live in, we should take advantage of it to make a contribution.