Precariousness and Vulnerability in Science Production: The Chilean Case

• In Event: Disrupting from the Inside: Towards a Research System Change - I

Abstract

The Chilean human advanced capital program has invested millions yearly since 2010. But this policy’s social positive impacts are not for granted. Hundreds of scholarship holders are now back to the country (the program stablish as an only obligation to come back), hoping to insert themselves into the scientific field and return to society, somehow, their benefit.
Discursively, this human advanced capital should help Chile to become a develop country, and then defeat poverty. However, since the beginning of the program, the amount invested by Chileans governments has decreased consistently during the same time. Scientific and educational institutions are not able to absorb hundreds of job positions annually. Many of of those young researchers must work on precarious alternative systems, if they found jobs related to science.
The National Science Funding System encourage a very liberal path of research: Science is conceived as an individual activity. The system doesn’t integrate any mechanism to evaluate social impacts, and generally speaking, there’s no visible links between science and society.
We interviewed twelve young researchers, coming back from the Chile’s Scholarship Program and with hard struggles to joint the scientific field. Inspired in the ethics of care (Slote, 2007; Laugier, 2015), theoretical framework about marginalization (Shildrick, 2015) and in the vulnerability as a way to resist (Butler, 2016), we want to understand their production of knowledge, expectations, perceptions and strategies. This goes far beyond the mode 1 and 2 of production of knowledge (Antony Gibbons et. al, 1994).

Author

• Claudio Broitman, Universidad de Santiago de Chile