Browsing by Subject "Chile"
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Item Essays on Social Security Reform: A Study of the 1981 and 2008 Chilean Reforms(2018-07) Schlehuber, KathleenThis thesis studies the welfare impact of Social Security reform through case studies of reforms done in Chile in 1981 and 2008. Chapter 2 presents the literature related to the topic. Chapter 3 uses Chilean micro-data in order to measure how workers substitute between formal work, informal work, and home production. These estimates will be used in subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 studies the 1981 reform in which Chile moved from a pay-as-you-go Social Security system to a program of private, individual retirement accounts. Chapter 5 studies a secondary reform from 2008 which amended the minimum pension available to those workers who do not save sufficiently for their own retirement.Item The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial Practice Among Mapuche Activists and Student Protesters in Santiago, Chile(2015-09) McKay, KellyThis project is a choreographic and historiographic analysis of practices by which contemporary activists in Santiago, Chile create new embodied frameworks for the production of space. I study the relationship between the ongoing Chilean student rebellion and the Mapuche rights movement by examining divergences between the respective spatial practices of protest undertaken by student protestors and Mapuche activists. By spatial practices, I mean the embodied activities through which people produce and alter space. While student protestors frequently make performative and discursive connections to Mapuche, I question whether these connections constitute political alignments or appropriations of indigeneity. In order to investigate whether student protest practices align with Mapuche activist political projects, I analyze the ways that both student protestors and Mapuche activists enact radical reconfigurations of space in the city of Santiago through their embodied practices. I identify various performative mechanisms by which student protestors and Mapuche activists produce and change space, including (but not limited to) choreographic restructurings, sonic interventions, and embodied reimaginings. My ethnographic work focuses on case studies in order to show the distinct embodied frameworks for the production of space posed by students, often in contrast to those posed by Mapuche. My historiographic work historicizes the spatial practices I identify through an analysis of protest focused on spatiality. While most scholarly treatments of student and indigenous social movements conceive of protest as deliberative political enunciations addressed to a state apparatus, my project proposes an understanding of protest as spatial practice. This focus on space allows for a careful analysis of the differences between the everyday embodied practices of activists in the respective movements.Item Fleshing out conservation: performative ecologies and embodied practice in Chilean temperate rainforest management(2012-08) Pratt, Kathryn C.This dissertation brings recent theories of embodiment, practice, and performance to bear on community-based conservation in the temperate rainforest region of Southern Chile. The goal of the project is to respond to a problem that conservation scientists often call the “implementation crisis.” Essentially, we have abundant knowledge of conservation models, strategies, and best practices, but yet we still struggle to implement effective community-based projects on the ground. Political ecologists have tried to address this issue by unpacking the cultural politics of conservation, explaining the fate of projects in relation to, for example, competing understandings of community, conflicts around gender and social difference, or clashes between different knowledge systems. Problems occur, it is argued, when conditions on the ground do not conform to pre-given categories, such as when the lines between “local” and “expert” become blurred, or when complex and unbounded social relations contradict our notions of bounded, homogeneous communities. This dissertation works to challenge and extend these critical perspectives by “fleshing out” environmental practices in Chile. I argue that in emphasizing contentious cultural categories, practitioners and scholars alike have tended to neglect the everyday lived experiences of making conservation happen. The dissertation draws on fieldwork conducted with two projects based near the town of Valdivia, Chile: a newly formed private reserve that was partnering with local communities on conservation and development projects and a firewood certification program working with small landholders on sustainable forest management. The focus of my research is on the actual performance of conservation. I start not with cultural categories but with the material interactions that make projects tick. For example, I trace the movements of actors as they negotiate project work, study skills as they are learned and practiced in the field, examine collaborations as they take form, and explore how everyday misadventures can turn into creative solutions. To support my claims, I draw on a growing interdisciplinary body of research that addresses the creative, corporeal, and emergent nature of practice, including non-representational theories in geography, practice theories from sociology and anthropology, theories of embodied cognition from the cognitive sciences, and materialist feminisms. These literatures all contend that social processes are not just the outcome of competing ideas and representations, but also emerge from the actions of people physically engaged in their environment. Each chapter explores a different way in which practice plays a significant role in conservation projects. Chapter 2 presents a re-examination of the environmental politics of vision and representation by showing that vision is much more tied to bodily movement than has previously been assumed. Chapter 3 considers another central area of political ecology critique: the politics of environmental knowledge, especially clashes between “expert” scientific and “local” indigenous knowledge. Political ecologists claim that one of the problems of community-based conservation is that too often it involves imposing scientific modes of understanding on local groups whose indigenous forms of knowledge are not equally valued. I argue that what often gets ignored in these discussions is the role of embodied skill in constituting environmental know-how. Chapter 4 examines how collaboration works in conservation projects. Although there has been considerable discussion of the problematic use of the term community within grassroots conservation initiatives, I argue that these conversations too have tended to neglect the embodied, relational aspects of practice. As an alternative to the logic and counter-logic of community, I suggest developing a performative understanding of togetherness which I call “associating.” While chapters 2-4 all emphasize the novel and serendipitous qualities of conservation practice, Chapter 5 addresses repetition. I show that mundane, routine, and habitual aspects of conservation work are important for instilling the sensitivity and awareness to unspoken aspects of environmental projects. Moreover, I show how such tedium actually contributes to the creative process, rather than, as we might assume, introducing complacency in conservation. I conclude by reflecting on what is gained by developing a more “fleshy” understanding of conservation and environmental management.Item Histories in its Walls: La Moneda, memory and reconciliation in Post-Authoritarian Chile.(2010-08) Strasma, Mary GraceIn the contentious struggles over the interpretation of Chile's past, the presidential palace, La Moneda, exemplifies the dynamic interactions of history, memory, place, and national identity. This dissertation argues that the actual physical site of La Moneda has been used throughout Chile's history as a stage for the performance of legitimacy and citizenship, while its image - particularly the image of the building in flames on September 11, 1973 -- has been used as both a symbol and, more recently, a text. In 2000, after a decade of post-authoritarian transition and the accompanying struggles over memory of the 1973 military coup and the Pinochet dictatorship that followed, then-President Ricardo Lagos took the symbolic step of re-opening of La Moneda to visits by ordinary Chileans. This created a unique opportunity to examine, through visitor surveys and interviews, how the site functions as a focus of Chilean historical discourse and governance. While the reopening was an important element of the Lagos administration's push for reconciliation, the administration was not able to control fully the interpretation or experience that visitors drew from La Moneda. This reveals the tensions inherent in any historic or emblematic site. Further, this history of the uses of La Moneda by Chilean leaders and of the public reactions to it demonstrates that despite Lagos' desire to declare Chile's transition complete, memory struggles related to the historical interpretation of the military coup of 1973 were still present as late as September 2003, as seen in the symbolic dimensions of this place.Item Literatura, memoria y medioambiente en Chile. Una experiencia ecocrítica Literature, memory and environment in Chile. An ecocritic experience(2019-09) Palma Zuniga, EvaDuring Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973 – 1989) human rights were systematically violated. Thousands of people were tortured, killed or disappeared. In spite of the substantial relevance and tremendous impact the massive loss of human lives signifies for a whole nation, there is another consequence that should be taken into consideration, and that is the loss of the land and the violence executed against nature. Large extensions of natural spaces were wiped out during Pinochet’s dictatorship and continue suffering the aggression of democratic governments and industrial activity. Along with the disappearance of the land, also were destroyed many other forms of life, including animals, insects, birds, plants, trees, and furthermore, native communities and their active cultural traditions were intervened. This interdisciplinary work attempts to explore the links between the study fields of environment, memory and identity studies, in order to decentralize the debate from the anthropocentric view, and therefore, explore new contributions that might come from the more than human world. Converging the disciplines of environment, memory and identity will also shed light on the human rights debate in Chile, by taking it beyond the Pinochet’s dictatorship frame (where mainly this discussion remains). Even though it is true that dictatorship changed the course of Chile’s history, it also changed the way the individual started connecting with the environment. On the one hand, the land turned into a witness of resistance amidst the new dictatorial reality, and on the other hand, became the source of natural resources that would give Chile the economic growth. Therefore, a turn to a more ecocentric perspective in these fields, will bring the possibility to discover new voices and sources of memory, that go beyond the spoken word. That is to say, a more ecocentric perspective will provide the possibility of the language of nature as a voiceless witness of the past.Item The Neotropical caddisfly genus Tolhuaca (Trichoptera: Glossosomatidae)(Magnolia Press, 2005) Robertson, Desiree R.; Holzenthal, Ralph W.The caddisfly genus Tolhauca Schmid 1964 (Glossosomatidae: Protoptilinae) is diagnosed and discussed in the context of other protoptiline genera, and a review of its taxonomic history is provided. A new species, Tolhuaca brasiliensis, from southeastern Brazil, is described and illustrated, and the type species, Tolhuaca cupulifera Schmid 1964, from Chile, is redescribed and illustrated. Additionally, females of the genus are described and illustrated for the first time. Characters of the female genitalia, wing venation, and thorax suggest that Tolhuaca is more primitive than any other protoptiline genus and probably deserves a basal placement within the subfamily. The genus shows a broadly disjunct distribution perhaps reflecting an ancient southern Gondwana pattern.Item Rethinking disappearance in Chilean post-coup narratives.(2011-05) Howe, Alexis LynnThis dissertation explores Chilean narratives produced since the 1973 coup d'état (from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods) and analyzes representations of disappearance, which range from the institutionalized practice of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship, to the erasure of inconvenient histories and memories during the transition to democracy, and the persistent vanishing of marginal subjects in neoliberal democratic Chile. Focusing on the work of Ana Vásquez, Luz Arce, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, and Diamela Eltit, who present disappearance in numerous forms and in a variety of genres (novels, testimonio, drama, film, and texts that blur generic boundaries), I argue that, as one of many authoritarian continuities in democratic Chile, disappearance persists in the present. My study begins to articulate other manifestations of disappearance that extend beyond the notion of enforced disappearance as a phenomenon contained during the dictatorship period, and constitutes a space for rethinking disappearance in neoliberal democracies.Item Role of Point Sources on the Dissemination of Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment(2018-10) BUENO PADILLA, IRENEPoint sources such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), terrestrial agriculture, and aquaculture, release antibiotic residues, antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB), and antibiotic resistance genes (ARG) into the aquatic ecosystem. However, increases of ARB and ARG in the natural environment associated with specific point sources have not been widely quantified. The goals of this dissertation were to improve study designs for measuring environmental ARB and ARG, and the methodology to attribute environmental findings to specific point sources. Two systematic reviews were conducted to analyze the evidence for increases of ARB and ARG in the natural environment associated with point sources. Both reviews highlighted the lack of quantitative causal research, and the need for improved study design, control of biases, and analytical tools to provide effect measures. Recommendations drawn from these systematic reviews informed two longitudinal studies assessing the role of freshwater trout farms and WWTPs on environmental ARG abundance in a watershed in Chile. Sediment samples from river sites located at different distances upstream and downstream from each point source were analyzed. Also, wild birds trapped around one of the WWTPs were evaluated for their role as disseminators of ARG. A microfluidic qPCR approach was used to quantify an array of ARG, and statistical analyses were conducted to evaluate the effect of the point sources on ARG abundance in the surrounding natural environment. Results showed a statistically significant increase of ARG at downstream sites compared to upstream sites, indicating that these sources were contributing to releases of ARG into the surrounding environment. However, the biological significance remains unclear and deserves further examination. Migratory birds presented a statistically significantly higher ARG abundance compared to non-migratory species. Even though wild birds are recognized as playing a part in the dissemination of ARB globally, results from this study can’t be overstated. The long-term goal of this research would include the development of a watershed-based monitoring system to evaluate all point sources that contribute to increases and dissemination of ARB and ARG. A better understanding of dissemination pathways would allow targeting management strategies to mitigate the risk to public health, animal health, and ecosystem health.