Suchergebnisse

Puchuncaví es un territorio de la costa central de Chile tristemente conocido por la intensidad de su contaminación industrial. Allí la vida humana está marcada por una experiencia somática tan persistente como ambigua: la de sentir algo raro en el aire ⎯literalmente, la experiencia de una atmósfera que envuelve, irrita y oprime. Se trata de una afectación tenue que apenas sobrepasa el umbral de la percepción, pero que sin embargo cifra de manera sistemática la fenomenología sensorial de los habitantes de la zona. ¿Pero qué es exactamente lo que se siente en Puchuncaví? A medio camino entre una bitácora etnográfica y una especulación teórica, en este breve ensayo exploro una posibilidad: que eso que se siente en Puchuncaví sea, más que simples toxinas en suspensión, una vibración ⎯un campo energético compuesto en partes iguales por procesos químicos y estados anímicos, metaloides venenosos y descuidos crónicos, una quimiosfera y una psicoesfera formando un particular envoltorio tóxico. Este aire enrarecido de Puchuncaví nos enfrenta a dos imperativos teóricos. Primero, nos invita a pensar los humores y afectos como objetos aprehensibles somáticamente, y por tanto a revisar la separación entre psique y cuerpo. Y segundo, el campo vibracional de Puchuncaví nos invita a pensar sobre las capacidades acondicionantes del capitalismo industrial y sobre el Antropoceno como la construcción de un tipo particular de ánimo atmosférico.

This article explores how citizen participation was methodologically devised and materially articulated in the postdisaster reconstruction of Constitución, one of the most affected cities after the earthquake and tsunami that battered south central Chile in 2010. I argue that the techniques deployed to engineer the participation were arranged as a policy experiment where a particular type of public was provoked—one characterized by its emotional detachment, political engagement, and social tolerance. The case of Constitución, however, also shows that this public ran parallel to other forms of being a public not aligned with the experiment's assumptions. More broadly, the article argues that while disaster studies need to acknowledge the generative capacities of public participation, science and technology studies should include disasters as a particular setting for participatory experiments.

This article questions radical planning's insistence on an ontological distinction between lay and expert knowledge. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives in Santiago, Chile, I explain how citizen organisations, in their quest for political recognition and emancipation, embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, formal and instrumental knowledge and tactics. Utilising insights from Science and Technology Studies, I call modes of technification the specific and differentiated strategies by which these collectives become technical entities. Three of these modes are described: the organisational, epistemic and generative modes. The larger claim is that radical planning, by pursuing a politics of difference, may end up enacting a world in which identities are essentialised and roles forcefully allocated.

AbstractChile has achieved a dramatic reduction in material poverty since 1990, in part through a massive programme of state‐subsidized housing that has almost eliminated slums, especially in Santiago. Sceptics assert that the improvement in material conditions has been accompanied by a decline in the cohesion and quality of 'community' in poor neighbourhoods. This article challenges this assertion, using data from a 1985 survey conducted in poblaciones (i.e. public housing dating from the 1960s) and a 2001 survey conducted in newly built public housing or villas. In contrast to popular wisdom, these surveys suggest that villas score higher than poblaciones in most indicators of social capital analyzed. Finally, this article contends that in order to comprehend the relation between poverty, space and community, more networked and decentred analytical approaches are needed.Résumé Le Chili est parvenu à une diminution drastique de la pauvreté matérielle depuis 1990, en partie grâce à un énorme programme de logements financés par l'État qui a quasiment éliminé les taudis, notamment à Santiago. Les sceptiques affirment que l'amélioration des conditions matérielles s'est accompagnée d'un recul de la cohésion et de la qualité de la «communauté» dans les quartiers pauvres. L'article conteste cette opinion en s'appuyant sur une enquête menée en 1985 dans les poblaciones (logements sociaux datant des années 1960) et sur une étude de 2001 réalisée dans les logements sociaux ou villas bâtis récemment. Allant à l'encontre de l'avis général, ces enquêtes suggèrent que les villas dépassent les poblaciones sur la plupart des indicateurs de capital social analysés. Pour finir, l'article avance que, pour comprendre la relation entre pauvreté, espace et communauté, il faut des approches analytiques plus interconnectées et décentrées.

Non-renewable fossil fuels made possible what has been called the modern world. Given that non-renewable resources are increasingly becoming more and more difficult and costly to extract, the transition to renewable energy sources is a crucial task. In order to frame possible avenues towards responsible innovation and transition in democratic societies, this paper will built on the concept of "earthly experiments" to highlight some of the conditions and processes that may foster responsible innovation and learning processes. This is done by building on empirical examples from the establishment of geothermal energy systems. The paper will then unfold the sociological notion of earthly experiments in order to critically highlight on what this could mean to democratically constitute citizens as part of "science" thus conceived. The paper will show how such experimental processes deal with questions of acceptability and democratic governance, and how the political limits of experimentality are rendered visible and manageable. We show to what extent "experiments in the wild" are able to cope with increasing uncertainty and the unavoidable ignorance that complicate conditions for the transition towards renewable energy, but that may also open up new paths towards the engagement of citizens in processes of technoscientific exploration. ; Los combustibles fósiles no-renovables hicieron posible lo que se ha llamado el mundo moderno. Dado que los recursos no renovables son cada vez más difíciles y costosos de extraer, la transición a fuentes de energías renovables es una tarea crucial. En orden a enmarcar posibles caminos hacia la innovación responsable y transición dentro de las sociedades democráticas, este artículo se construye en torno al concepto de experimentos "terrenales" o fuera-del-laboratorio para destacar algunas de las condiciones y procesos que pueden promover procesos colectivos de aprendizaje. Esto es hecho por medio de ejemplos empíricos con respecto al establecimiento de sistemas de energía geotérmicas. El artículo trabajará sobre la noción sociológica de experimentos terrenales, entendiéndolos como parte sustantiva de la sociedad, con el fin de destacar críticamente qué podría significar una "ciencia" así concebida para una ciudadanía democráticamente constituida. El artículo mostrará cómo estos procesos experimentales lidian con cuestiones referentes a la aceptabilidad y la gobernanza democrática, y de qué manera aparecen y se gestionan los límites de la experimentalidad de cara a sus desafíos políticos. Mostramos que los "experimentos a la intemperie" tendrán que enfrentarse con incertidumbres crecientes y la inevitable ignorancia que complica las condiciones para la transición hacia energías renovables, pero que también pueden abrir nuevos caminos para involucrar a la ciudadanía en procesos de exploración tecnocientífica.

The island of Chiloé, in southern Chile, was the mise-en-scene of an unprecedented project: the development of a wind farm in which the Hulliche community, the ancestral people of the area, would own and run the operation. With the support of the Inter-American Development Bank, the aim of the project was the production of sustainable and renewable energies, but more importantly the integration of indigenous communities into the Chilean society via their participation in a high-value economic enterprise. Drawing on the idea of citizen participation as a form of experimentation, in this article we follow ethnographically the process of incubation, development and failure of this project. The case, we argue, allows a reflection about the risk of cultural aggression embedded in participatory experiments, but also about their capacities to crack open productive spaces for identity, political and ethical speculation. We coin the term "ontological disagreements" to indicate the ambivalences of participatory experiments and to debate about the future of indigenous engagement in energy projects. ; La isla de Chiloé, en el sur de Chile, fue el escenario de un proyecto sin precedentes: el desarrollo de un parque eólico donde la comunidad Huilliche, pueblo ancestral de la zona, sería propietaria del proyecto. Con el sostén del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, el proyecto buscaba apoyar la transición hacia una matriz eléctrica más limpia; pero sobre todo integrar de manera definitiva a los pueblos originarios en la sociedad chilena a través de su participación en empresas económicas de alto valor. Siguiendo la idea de la participación ciudadana como experimentación, en este artículo seguimos etnográficamente el proceso de gestación, desarrollo y posterior fracaso del proyecto. El caso, argumentamos, permite reflexionar sobre los riesgos de agresión cultural a los que están expuestos los experimentos participativos, pero también sobre su capacidad para abrir espacios productivos de especulación identitaria, ética y política. Acuñamos la figura de los "disensos ontológicos" para mostrar las ambivalencias de los experimentos participativos y para debatir sobre el futuro de la implicación de los pueblos originarios en el desarrollo eléctrico chileno.

How can politics be articulated or at least imagined by ill, impoverished and abandoned communities? This article documents how care is invoked by activist groups and local citizens in their search for ethical recognition and environmental justice in Puchuncaví, Chile. The authors argue that in a context of prolonged and systematic harm, care emerges as a way to render their suffering understandable, knowable and actionable, and thus as a mode of intervention that instantiates politics in different spaces and at several scales. At the interfaces of feminist science studies, environmental sociology and political theory, this article examines how care acts as a grammar to enunciate problems and make connections deemed irrelevant by expert apparatuses. Specifically, the authors ethnographically track the capacity of care practices to create therapeutic spaces of affective endurance and healing, and to produce new forms of sensual and ecological knowledge about beings, things and relations. These different modes of caring and being cared for, it is suggested, underline the capacity of care for the politicization of harm and suffering: to re-arrange what is visibilized, valued and problematized in the face of intractable environmental crises - a crucial objective for collectives removed from every form of politics. Care, as it is articulated here, is not a coherent and predefined programme, but a fluid and adaptable ethico-political set of practices and potentialities always concerning specific individuals facing specific problems in specific circumstances. If care is to be mobilized to craft more responseable policy, researchers should think more thoroughly about these multiple configurations of care, and the disparate ways in which they can contribute (or not) to invoke new styles and formats, new sensitivities and possibilities for policy-making.

In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry—chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the "project" as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Puchuncaví, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial compound in Chile, to encounter the inorganic through and with its inorganicness and to attend to the situated, historicized, and political composition of both our materials and our experiences. Thinking of this as a collective provocation, we do not rehearse a conventional argument. Its parts are connected but only partially. There is no dramatic arc but rather an attempt at composing an atmosphere through which our thought and feelings are invoked. We have made visible the authorship behind each of the stories recounted here to celebrate the multivocality of our collaboration and to rehearse a nonabstracted mode of attention to Puchuncaví and the inorganic forces and entities we encountered there. We connect our irritations and speculations with the Anthropocene precisely as a way of summoning the multiple violences, many of them of planetary reach, that have to be denounced when situating our knowledge practices in Puchuncaví. Thinking about the ethico-political challenges of research in territories that have been, and are being, transformed under the weighty history of contamination and that are lived in and lived with by generations of beings (human and otherwise), we call in our concluding remarks for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.