The Neoliberal University in the Global South: Lessons from a Failed Chile-US Scientific Collaboration

• In Event: STS and Universities - III

Abstract

In 2009, the uncritical assumption that scientists and students in different countries experience and respond to neoliberalism in the same way led to the spectacular failure of a US-Chilean archaeological collaboration. In Chile, universities have always been central battlegrounds during national political upheavals. Associated first with progressive liberal democracy following independence from Spain, and later with 1960s socialist popularism; universities were the first and last sites of active repression during the 1973-1980 Pinochet dictatorship. In 2006, 2008, and 2011-13 country-wide demonstrations against the privatization of higher education became emblematic of Chileans’ struggle to redefine public participation in the democratic era and to cast-off the violent neoliberalism that characterized the dictatorship. Drawing from a multisited ethnography of transnational scientific collaborations, this paper examines the consequences of assuming that universities and scientific communities everywhere experience globalization and neoliberalism in the same way.

Author

• Mary Leighton, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor