Re-Enacting the Chilean STS Community: Scientific Collaboration, Institutional Cleavages and Early Institutionalization in the Post-Transitional Chile

• In Event: Latin American Entanglements of Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, Coloniality - III

Abstract

This presentation seeks to explore different forms of making and doing STS, in the post-transitional Chilean context. Recently, scientific and technological activity in Chile is in changing, i.e., through the implementation of the new Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation. However, since the return to democracy in 1990, the Chilean State has tried to modernize and promote public policies based on scientific evidence, and also bring science closer to citizens, which has been seen as a fragmented effort of multiple institutions and informal communities. During 2011 a group of diverse scientific communities characterized by voluntarism, activism, and collaborative research developed a common space called the Chilean STS community (CTS-Chile). Over the year the community attracted scientists from the fields of engineering, history, philosophy, social sciences, and psychology, which seek to produce and innovate in new practices of knowledge and care. We exhibit the results of empirical research carried out to the leading members of this Community of Practice, seeking to understand their motivations, their types of technical achievements, the traps and institutional deficiencies that they avoided and the importance of being recognized as a diverse group of scientists. Furthermore, we explore the opportunities and difficulties that the CTS-Chile has had to make science more inclusive and democratic, particularly in terms of geography, gender and share scientific goals.

Authors

• Nicolás Sanhueza, P. Catholic University of Chile

• Pedro Pablo Seguel, University of Texas at Austin

• Martin Andrés Perez Comisso, SFIS - Arizona State University