Mapping educational protests in post-dictatorship Chile (1990-2019). A geo-referenced analysis

• In Event: Educational struggles in Latin America: Everyday Protests and Shifting Movements in Chile and beyond

Proposal

The Chilean educational system is internationally considered a paradigmatic example of a highly marketized system. During the civil-military dictatorship (1973-1989), market driven reforms were implemented, and the Chilean educational system went from being a predominantly state system to a one characterized by competition, the centrality of private agents in the provision education and for the development of a system of accountability with high consequences. During the last decades, massive protests led by secondary and university students have questioned the role and centrality of the market, particularly in 2006 and 2011. Although a solid field of study about these protests has been developed, the analysis of the space and geography of educational protests is still an incipient topic of research, and to date, has been approached mainly from qualitative perspectives and focused on the cycles of student’s mobilization in Santiago, the country’s capital. In this context, our article starts from a quantitative, longitudinal, and dialectical interaction perspective between protests and geography, analyzing the geographical dynamics of the protests between 1990 and 2019, accounting for the geographical distribution, spatial patterns of protest and the relationship between places and the dynamics of protests in the chilean post-dictatorship. To carry out the analysis, we used Protest Event Analysis (PEA) using secondary information from the three country’s main newspapers, resulting in a data set of 1.765 events. To get to the geographical perspective, a re-coding of the data set was carried out in order to locate specifically each protest event as accurately as possible. In the first place, the results indicate that the protests are an eminently urban phenomenon and especially concentrated in the capital city. This shows the central place that the city occupies in understanding the development of social conflict and the creative construction of alternatives in contemporary capitalist societies. Second, the data shows that the distribution of protest events does not directly reproduce the socioeconomic segregation pattern of the city, as we observed a spatial concentration is observed in the center of the city, where some of the main institutions that represent the political power of the country, together with educational institutions and symbolic places. Consequently, the educational protest follows a logic of expansion from the center to the periphery, for which reason it seems more a reflection of the capacity for expansion and visualization, than a way of reproducing the patterns of levels of socioeconomic segregation. In third place, we see that the educational protest is shaped from the space in which it occurs, and this, in turn, can also be shaped by the protest itself and act as a facilitating or hindering element of its success. Broadly, the article seeks to show how the geography of protests is configured as a central element to understand the collective action of social movements, seeking to contribute to understanding the way in which the spatial dimension of collective action affects and articulates in the educational protests of the last decades in Chile.

Authors

• Sebastian Pereira, CEPPE UC

• Cristobal Villalobos, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Lluís Parcerisa, University of Barcelona