Diana Graizbord

Diana Graizbord is assistant professor of sociology and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on political sociology and science studies to explain how expertise shapes democracy and the politics of distribution. 

While at Notre Dame, Graizbord will work on the project “A State of Dementia: Populist Austerity and Cognitive Capacity in Mexico,” which examines how Mexico’s austerity policies under President Lopez Obradoe have weakened the states cognitive capacity by undermining technical agencies and institutional memory.

Her first book, Indicators of Democracy: The Politics and Promise of Evaluation Expertise in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2024) examines how program and policy evaluation experts in Mexico channel democratic ideals through technocratic methods, shaping accountability efforts and the politics of redistribution in subtle but profound ways. Related work has been published in Public Culture, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development and Ethnography, among others.

Previously she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the 2020-2021 academic year. Her expertise is routinely sought by government agencies in Mexico, and most recently, she served as a technical advisor and coordinator of a qualitative impact evaluation of a high-profile Mexican rural development program, and between 2018 and 2023 she developed and delivered a series of research capacity-building workshops to government officials, training hundreds of participants to design and use qualitative research to improve policy processes and outcomes.

Diana earned a PhD from Brown University where she was an NSF-IGERT Fellow in Development and Inequality in the Global South.