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 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.

La Casita is a vibrant cultural, artistic, and educational center supported by Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Chancellor.  The Center is committed to promoting and documenting the arts and culture of Central New York’s Latino/Latin American community through collaborative programming in the visual and expressive arts, education, and community activism.